PROGRESS AGAINST THE WARSAW FRAMEWORK
NS/AP: A monitoring framework with joint indicators was developed for Peru’s National REDD+ Strategy (Estrategia Nacional de Bosques y Cambio Climático, 2016) and the Joint Declaration of Intent between Norway, Germany, and the UK, and the REDD+ priority actions were validated with the forestry and agriculture departments.
FREL/FRL: Peru has advanced in developing a second FREL for the Amazon biome including gross deforestation using a different and enhanced methodology from the first FREL, through a sampling grid using stratified area estimations. The new document was submitted to the UNFCCC in February 2021.
NFMS: A protocol for indigenous peoples and community-based monitoring and MRV was developed as part of the national MRV system, with broad participation from communities and government institutions.
SIS: On safeguards, there was substantial progress over the course of 2020, with the country publishing its first summary of safeguards information for the period 2012-2019. In addition, a prototype of the SIS has been developed and is currently undergoing review and finalization. Three meetings (including two virtual) of the Safeguards Technical Sub-Committee have been held, enabling consultation with a wide range of stakeholders on safeguards outputs and advances.
REDD+ IMPLEMENTATION
Inter-sectoral coordination and participatory platforms were strengthened through support and creation of i) a participatory platform at a macroregional level (Northern Coast of Peru); ii) two states (Madre de Dios and San Martin); iii) a municipal-level platform (Río Tambo); and iv) three intersectoral committees at a national level for coordination on REDD+ safeguards, forest degradation, and nesting.
Five bankable initiatives aligned to Peru’s REDD+ objectives were identified in the Amazon region with the support of UN-REDD. There are ongoing discussions with potential funders. Support was also provided to regional governments for examining the legal gaps to set up sub-national financial vehicles similar to the Amazon Development Fund (Fondo de Desarrollo Amazónico, or FONDESAM).
Seven virtual exchanges were organized with the National Federation of Savings and Loans Cooperatives (Federación Nacional de Cooperativas de Ahorro y Crédito del Perú, or FENACREP) on sustainable finance with a focus on the agricultural sector.
REDD+ priority actions, in line with the National Strategy on Forests and Climate Change (Estrategia Nacional Sobre Bosques y Cambio Climático, or ENBCC), were prioritized through a participatory consultative process.
The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard of the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART TREES) standard was preliminarily assessed for Peru, using existing data, however, this exercise will have to be completed with the new data from the FREL.
CHALLENGES AND SOLUTIONS
Peru was one of the countries hit hardest by COVID-19 and has had one of the highest excess death rates in the world during the pandemic. The government-mandated quarantine included the strict prohibition of meetings of more than 10 people and forbade all national travel except for emergency and frontline personnel. Due to this all activities that required travel and visits to communities in 2020 had to be stopped and readjusted to be implemented virtually when possible. This affected mainly activities that required consultation such as the prioritization of REDD+ Actions and community-based forest monitoring activities. In addition, the president of Peru was subjected to a second impeachment in November 2020, and a new interim president was appointed by Congress, resigning after only six days.
Despite this, and through a contingency plan, most of the activities were readjusted. Nonetheless, due to the substantial disruptions during the year, it was necessary to request a second no-cost extension to the UN-REDD Executive Board, which was granted until September 2021.
There were technical challenges to the estimation of deforestation for the second FREL, and the Ministry of the Environment and other agencies had to hire more experts to meet the tight deadlines.
GENDER AND SOCIAL INCLUSION
UN-REDD Programme support helped to integrate a gender perspective into the country’s first summary of information on REDD+ safeguards, wherein gender is noted as a cross-cutting element, participation of stakeholders is disaggregated by gender, and links to key gender-related policies, laws, and regulations are established in the elaboration of safeguards discussion.
Gender mainstreaming was also a priority in the implementation of activities in 2020. Overall, capacity-building activities benefited 162 women and 311 men (34 and 66 percent, respectively). In addition, women are well represented in Peruvian institutions and decision-making bodies related to REDD+, and the climate change director, mitigation director, and minister of the environment are all women. To illustrate, women occupied at least 40 percent of the seats in the subcommittees of Dialoguemos Peru, the main platform for participatory processes for forest and climate change at the national level.
For the virtual exchanges with FENACREP, surveys included questions related to women’s access to credit in the cooperative sector and examples of gender-related actions of international financial institutions were presented during the initial session. Women represented 33.7 percent of the participants of these webinars with FENACREP.
PARTNERSHIPS
Safeguards advances in Peru have been well coordinated with teams from both the World Bank and the Forest Investment Program (FIP), with inputs from work on the FCPF SESA and ESMF, and the FIP feeding into the overall implementation of the safeguards road map.
Studies supported through UN-REDD on infrastructure drivers of deforestation during the pandemic, and the portfolio of investments, were coordinated with the GCFTF initiative to ensure complementarity and avoid duplication.
LINKAGES TO SDGS
UN-REDD activities in Peru contributed directly to SDGs 10, 13, and 15.
