It is true that REDD+ has not yet succeeded at its fundamental goal – reducing deforestation. Those trends are worrying in many places, but preparing for REDD+ has laid the groundwork for future progress, Duchelle said.

“REDD+ has helped to create a global alliance for forest protection that encompasses land tenure and rights recognition through its safeguards,” she said.

In addition, it has improved our understanding of deforestation drivers, galvanized the development of national forest monitoring systems, and increased national stakeholder engagement in forest policy decisions, Duchelle said.”

Slow progress?

The original idea of REDD+ was one of results-based payments for avoided deforestation, and it has taken more than a decade to create the conditions under which REDD+ can begin to function as it was envisioned.

But tropical countries should not be blamed for the delay, Seymour said. Behind the scenes, many tropical countries and sub-national jurisdictions have been making a lot of progress preparing for REDD+: developing baseline reference levels, setting up measurement, reporting and verification systems, and showing how they will ensure safeguards to protect the rights and livelihoods of vulnerable people.  Meanwhile, the obligations for donor countries are less clear.

“We’ve stacked up all of the things that the forest countries had to do and a lot of them have now done those things,” says Seymour. “The deal was those of us on the rich-country side were going to put up the big bucks. Well, guess who hasn’t held up their end of the deal?”

When REDD+ was proposed in 2007, it was thought that a global carbon market was imminent, and that that would “unleash the billions for REDD+,” Seymour said. Instead, a decade on, that market does not yet exist, and the international community is still finalizing the details in the context of negotiating the “rulebook” for implementation of the Paris Agreement.

Progress, therefore, needs to come from both donor and developing countries simultaneously. “We’re all in this boat together,” Seymour said. “Rich countries need to not only hold up our end of the bargain with the finance, but recognize that we’re paying little drips of money for forest conservation with this hand – and investing trillions in the things that are driving deforestation with the other hand.”

“Then we say: ‘Oh, you guys haven’t stopped deforestation yet.’ It’s absurd.”

The real test of REDD+ will come over the next few years, as the first generation of results-based payments starts to materialize, and their on-the-ground effects observed.

In February, Norway committed to pay Indonesia for saving 4.8 megatonnes of carbon dioxide through avoided deforestation in 2017, and the same month, the Green Climate Fund, a key source of financing for developing countries, agreed to pay Brazil $96.5 million for their forest-based emissions reductions in 2014-2015.

Help the flowers bloom

REDD+ isn’t a panacea, the study’s authors say. To solve the problem of tropical deforestation, we need to use all the tools we have – including deforestation-free agricultural supply chains, forest and landscape restoration, sustainable timber management, and renewed attention to strengthening the rights and livelihoods of indigenous peoples and local communities.

“We should be helping all of these flowers bloom at the moment,” Duchelle said.

Aligning finance from REDD+ with pressure from companies who want to ensure their supply chains are deforestation-free, for example, might be just enough to change domestic policies, Seymour said.

“You can imagine a stacking of incentives, where the governor of a forest-rich province can say, okay, I’ve got a potential $200 million in carbon funding if I meet this target, and telling me that they’ll preferentially source palm oil from here if we do this, and I’ll get my picture with Leonardo DiCaprio if I do that.”

Transformational change will require new constituencies in forest-rich countries – groups of people across the political spectrum that see the value in forests.

That requires better engagement, about “not only the cost of land conversion and environmental disasters, but the quantified development benefits of standing forests,” says Duchelle. “We still need to bring in a lot of different people into these discussions.”

Challenges remain, but REDD+ has evolved – and Seymour says it still shows more promise than many of the other potential solutions to deforestation she’s seen unsuccessfully tried over the past 40 years.

“Progress has steadily been made, but the whole premise of REDD+, the large-scale finance for performance, remains largely untested. In the meantime, forests have continued to disappear, and yet the case for conserving them is stronger than ever.

“Why wouldn’t we use the mechanism that we have painstakingly negotiated, and that countries have invested in getting ready for? Now is the time.”