June 2015: The UN Collaborative Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (UN-REDD) released its ‘Sixth Consolidated Annual Progress Report,’ which covers the Programme’s achievements in 2014. Overall, the report notes that in 2014, 56 countries participated as partner countries with US$47.8 million in funding allocated to activities in 2014.

According to the report, decisions such as the Warsaw Framework for REDD+, the outcomes of the 19th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the New York Declaration on Forests facilitated significant progress in the implementation of REDD+. Such agreements also contributed to the development of the new UN-REDD strategy for 2016-2020.

Other achievements highlighted in the report include the operational closure of programmes in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Ecuador, Solomon Islands and Zambia, the strengthening of collaboration with the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), and the provision of targeted support in response to 28 new requests.

In addition to releasing the progress report, UN-REDD convened a dialogue on gender and forests targeting indigenous women, delivered training on REDD+ to journalists in the Asia region, provided training for Pacific Island countries on forest reference levels, and released a video on using satellite data for monitoring REDD+. Additional videos were released on safeguards and safeguard information systems (SIS) in Asia and the Pacific and land use change in Costa Rica.

The UN-REDD Programme also supported a number of South-South exchanges of experiences on topics such as forest reference levels in Asia, and stakeholder participation and gender mainstreaming in Latin America and the Caribbean. [Publication: Sixth Consolidated Annual Progress Report of the UN-REDD Programme Fund] [Publication: The REDD+ Resource – June/July 2015]