Forum on Readiness for REDD

Today, United Nations mechanisms known as REDD—Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation— drive major investments in forest protection efforts in countries with tropical forests. By tackling deforestation, REDD is addressing one of the largest drivers of climate change. But in its early days, REDD lacked the capacity to oversee billions of dollars in financing, support multilateral negotiations, and drive policy reform. Through the Forum on Readiness for REDD (the Forum), Meridian provided strategic advice, facilitation, and process design to help tropical forested countries prepare for REDD funding opportunities. These efforts helped the Forum forge crucial relationships and build capacity amongst indigenous community leaders, civil society, and multilateral institutions.

The Forum engaged REDD stakeholders to build the capacity of tropical forest countries to implement and benefit from activities to reduce deforestation and degradation. Meridian led trainings for tropical forest country representatives on the concept of REDD and forest carbon. We also organized consultative workshops with local communities and REDD implementors in Cambodia, Laos, and Vietnam. These consultations informed our institutional-level support of the Forum and REDD Secretariat (then located at Woods Hole Research Center) as they developed a global agenda, assessed implementation needs and priorities, and built common information frameworks.

Fundamental to the Forum’s success was Meridian’s ability to steer effective collaboration between groups frequently siloed by their sectoral, geographic, and political differences. We built upon our track record of figuring out how to institutionalize and scale new ideas within complex contexts. We helped REDD’s early designers and implementors ask the right questions and troubleshoot governance solutions that served as foundations for REDD’s evolution into a global catalyst for climate and forest action.