Noting that fiscal policies and incentives are often key underlying drivers of forest change, and influence land use behavior in sectors that encroach on forests, a brief produced by the UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) suggests that REDD+ provides an entry point to rethinking fiscal incentives for agricultural commodities as part of National REDD+ Strategies and Action Plans.
September 2015: Noting that fiscal policies and incentives are often key underlying drivers of forest change and influence land use behavior in sectors that encroach on forests, a brief produced by the UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) suggests that REDD+ provides an entry point to rethinking fiscal incentives for agricultural commodities as part of National REDD+ Strategies and Action Plans.
Titled ‘Fiscal Incentives for Agricultural Commodity Production: Options to Forge Compatibility with REDD+,’ the brief notes an urgent need to identify how policy changes can increase the efficiency of agricultural production and reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. Fiscal and policy incentives that support agricultural development were usually not designed with REDD+ in mind; it is thus suggested that they need to be better understood and revised to identify the complementarities and conflicts with REDD+ as well as their social, economic and environmental impacts and benefits.
The brief provides a set of working definitions for the full range of subsidies and fiscal incentives that affect agriculture production and land use; explains the basis of national and sectoral examples of why REDD+ is an entry point to rethinking policy tools for agricultural commodities; and explores opportunities for REDD+ countries to do this, providing a starting point for considering how to reform perverse subsidies to safeguard forests. Two case studies in the brief explore fiscal incentives promoting palm oil production in Ecuador and Indonesia in order to better understand the instruments in use, the impacts of these incentives on forests and what options the governments have to create better compatibility between palm oil production and REDD+. The brief also presents a number of success stories from around the globe and identifies knowledge gaps and pathways forward. [Publication: Fiscal Incentives for Agricultural Commodity Production: Options to Forge Compatibility with REDD+][UNEP Press Release]