10 September 2015: The Climate Investment Funds (CIF) has shared lessons from its Forest Investment Program (FIP), highlighting efforts on capacity building with a view to enhancing developing countries’ abilities to implement REDD+ in a sustainable and fair manner through principles such as country ownership and coordination with other REDD+ mechanisms.

In a feature story, the CIF notes that roughly 50% of FIP financing goes to capacity building, including institutional strengthening and governance reform. This is considered critical, as the success of implementing mitigation actions in the forest sector, including REDD+, largely depends on whether a country has the necessary financial, human, technological, legal and institutional resources in place. The CIF explains that FIP investment plans should be entirely owned by the country being financed. For this reason, FIP emphasizes the creation of explicit and concrete arrangements for country-level management of investment plans through central coordination units or within sector ministries. Finally, CIF highlights that since several multilateral programmes assist developing countries in achieving REDD+ readiness, coordination with them helps ensure strong capacity for REDD+ readiness in FIP activities.

An initiative of the World Bank and multilateral development banks, the CIF provides 63 developing and middle-income countries with resources to mitigate and manage the challenges of climate change and reduce their greenhouse gas emissions. FIP is one of its four funding windows, which also include the Clean Technology Fund, the Pilot Program for Climate Resilience and the Scaling Up Renewable Energy in Low Income Countries Program. [CIF Feature Story] [CIF Website] [FIP Webpage]