How can REDD+ promote & support social safeguards in national laws?

The document assesses the integration of the UNFCCC's Cancun safeguards into the national legal frameworks of Ghana, Liberia, and the Republic of Congo. It finds that while broad principles of participation and transparency exist in constitutions and forestry laws, they often lack practical procedural detail or consistent implementation. The briefing highlights a gap between high-level policy goals and the legal reality for local communities and indigenous peoples (LCIPs), particularly regarding land tenure and equitable benefit sharing. It suggests that REDD+ can act as a catalyst for legal reform, leveraging existing mechanisms like Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) and the EU's FLEGT-VPA initiative to strengthen forest governance.

• All three countries (Ghana, Liberia, and the Republic of Congo) have adopted national interpretations of the right to full and effective participation within their Safeguard Information Systems (SIS), requiring stakeholder identification in all REDD+ strategies and actions.
• Despite legal requirements, civil society and local communities in the three countries report a lack of meaningful participation in developing key REDD+ policy documents.
• Liberia's Land Rights Act 2018 is identified as the most progressive for LCIPs, as it recognizes customary land ownership as equal to public, government, and private land rights and requires free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) for land use.
• In the Republic of Congo, the 2018 Land Law creates barriers to LCIP land rights by requiring a complex centralized registration process and prohibiting the occupation of rural lands where construction cannot be undertaken, such as natural forests.
• Ghana's legal framework for land tenure provides few incentives for farmers and forest-owning communities to support REDD+ because they lack recognized ownership or 'tree tenure' rights to the forests they manage.
• Transparency in the three countries is primarily anchored in constitutional rights to information, but specific forestry laws often focus only on the logging sector, leaving a gap for broader REDD+ activities.
• Liberia possesses a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act of 2010, which is viewed as a promising tool for implementing the Cancun transparency safeguard, although it is not consistently applied in practice.
• There is no overarching national law dedicated to REDD+ benefit sharing in any of the three countries; instead, mechanisms are currently developed on a project-by-project basis or based on high-level policy guidelines.
• The EU's FLEGT-VPA initiative has contributed to forest governance by requiring transparency and benefit sharing in legality matrices for timber logging, which could serve as a model for REDD+.

APA

Haywood, C., & Ichou, B. (2019). How can REDD+ promote & support social safeguards in national laws? ClientEarth. https://www.clientearth.org/media/pdthnj3a/how-can-redd-promote-amp-support-social-safeguards-in-national-laws-ce-en.pdf

Chicago

Haywood, Caroline, and Benjamin Ichou. How can REDD+ promote & support social safeguards in national laws? ClientEarth, 2019. https://www.clientearth.org/media/pdthnj3a/how-can-redd-promote-amp-support-social-safeguards-in-national-laws-ce-en.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |last1=Haywood |first1=Caroline |last2=Ichou |first2=Benjamin |title=How can REDD+ promote & support social safeguards in national laws? |publisher=ClientEarth |date=October 2019 |url=https://www.clientearth.org/media/pdthnj3a/how-can-redd-promote-amp-support-social-safeguards-in-national-laws-ce-en.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{haywood2019how, author = {Haywood, Caroline and Ichou, Benjamin}, title = {{How can REDD+ promote \& support social safeguards in national laws?}}, institution = {ClientEarth}, year = {2019}, month = oct, url = {https://www.clientearth.org/media/pdthnj3a/how-can-redd-promote-amp-support-social-safeguards-in-national-laws-ce-en.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }