The Forest Investment Program (FIP) is a program within the World Bank’s Strategic Climate Fund (a multi-donor Trust Fund within the World Bank’s Climate Investment Funds). The FIP's overall objective is to mobilize significantly increased funds to reduce deforestation and forest degradation and to promote sustainable forest management, leading to emission reductions and the protection of carbon reservoirs.
The main purpose of the FIP is to support developing countries’ REDD-efforts, providing up-front bridge financing for readiness reforms and investments identified through national REDD readiness strategy building efforts, while taking into account opportunities to help them adapt to the impacts of climate change on forests and to contribute to multiple benefits such as biodiversity conservation and rural livelihoods enhancements. The FIP will finance efforts to address the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation and to overcome barriers that have hindered past efforts to do so.
The FIP will be designed to achieve four specific objectives (as stated in the Third Design Document, May 2009) (Climates Funds Update, 2009):
- To initiate and facilitate steps towards transformational change in developing countries forest related policies and practices, through:
- serving as a vehicle to finance investments and related capacity building necessary for the implementation of policies and measures that emerge from inclusive multi-stakeholder REDD planning processes at the national level;
- strengthening cross-sectoral ownership to scale up implementation of REDD strategies at the national and local levels;
- addressing key direct and underlying drivers of deforestation and forest degradation;
- supporting change of a nature and scope necessary to help significantly shift national forest and land use development paths;
- linking the sustainable management of forests and low carbon development;
- facilitating scaled-up private investment in alternative livelihoods for forest dependent communities that over time generate their own value;
- reinforcing ongoing efforts towards conservation and sustainable use of forests; and
- improving forest law enforcement and governance, including forest laws and policy, land tenure administration, monitoring and verification capability, and transparency and accountability.
- To facilitate the leveraging of additional and sustained financial resources for REDD, through a possible UNFCCC forest mechanism, leading to an effective and sustained reduction of deforestation and forest degradation, thereby enhancing the sustainable management of forests.
- To pilot replicable models to generate understanding and learning of the links between the implementation of forest-related investments, policies and measures and long-term emission reductions and conservation, sustainable management of forests and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries. By committing to apply a priori and ex post impact assessment of programs and projects, the FIP will ensure that the outcomes and effectiveness of FIP-supported interventions in reducing deforestation and forest degradation can be measured; and
- To provide valuable experience and feedback in the context of the UNFCCC deliberations on REDD.
Australia, Norway and the UK have already pledged $204 million to the World Bank’s Forest Investment Program, and Denmark has pledged 130 million kroner (€17m) promised to the programme.
Countries like Bangladesh, Zambia, Bolivia and Mozambique are due to benefit.
References
Climate Funds Update, 2009. http://www.climatefundsupdate.org/listing/forest-investment-program
http://www.cphpost.dk/climate/91-climate/47395-forestry-programs-get-danish-boost.html
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