Worldwide:

The BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL) seeks to promote reduced greenhouse gas emissions from land-use in four programme countries: Colombia, Ethiopia, Indonesia, and Zambia. This assignment is to produce a background document to support future discussions on the development of a comprehensive landscape methodological approach for accounting greenhouse gas (GHG) reduction to allow a result-based finance mechanism.

• LTS is leading the project, managing all inputs (deploying a multi-disciplinary team of experts) and taking direct responsible for the data review and collection in two of the programme countries Indonesia and Ethiopia.
• Our partners Ecofys and Shared Value Africa are responsible for technical work in Colombia and Zambia respectively.
• The project output will feed into a stakeholder workshop among the ISFL contributors (Germany, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States of America), planned for December 2016.

Countries are already reporting their GHG emissions using Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) methods. However further work is required to account for emission reductions with sufficient confidence to allow for result-based payments in the future. The ISFL seeks to develop a methodological approach that will confidently support results-based payments for comprehensive accounting of emission reductions across the entire AFOLU (Agriculture, Forestry and Other Land Uses) sector.

Solutions

To address the challenges, LTS’ key activities include:

• Providing a description of the key concepts in the IPCC guidelines to ensure common understanding among ISFL Contributors;
• Providing an analysis of available historic relevant data in the relevant ISFL program countries;
• Identifying key decisions and options going forward;
• Presenting and explaining the results to the ISFL contributors through a project workshop and final report.

Value and benefits

A thorough and comprehensive methodological approach to report GHG emission reductions, accurately enough to allow result-based financing at a landscape level across the four Programme Countries, will be developed through this project.