Beyond Carbon Financing

The document critiques the limitations of carbon financing for reducing deforestation and forest degradation (REDD), noting that strict quantification requirements create barriers for countries with low historical deforestation, unpredictable drivers, or weak institutions. It proposes 'sustainable development policies and measures' (SDPAMs) as a broader alternative under the Bali Action Plan, allowing for non-greenhouse gas metrics to verify progress in areas like land tenure and firefighting. The report suggests that developed countries provide support for these actions and implement policies to curb the import of illegally sourced timber to address global demand drivers.

• Carbon financing presents significant barriers for many developing countries because it requires the quantification of market-quality emission reductions, the establishment of credible reference scenarios to prevent leakage, and guarantees of permanence.
• Specific conditions make carbon-financing mechanisms difficult to implement: countries with historically low deforestation rates struggle to project reliable future emissions, those with unpredictable drivers like fires or droughts cannot easily define emission reductions, and those with weak forest governance institutions lack the capability to ensure permanent reductions.
• The report proposes 'sustainable development policies and measures' (SDPAMs) as a broader framework for REDD that uses non-greenhouse gas metrics to measure, report, and verify (MRV) actions that are hard to quantify in absolute emissions, such as combating illegal logging or building firefighting capabilities.
• To address the global demand for timber, food, and fuel, the report suggests that developed countries implement policies to reduce the import of illegal products, citing the United States' amendment of the Lacey Act as an example of a policy that bans illegally sourced timber and wood products.

APA

World Resources Institute (n.d.). Beyond Carbon Financing. https://www.wri.org/research/beyond-carbon-financing

Chicago

World Resources Institute. Beyond Carbon Financing. n.d. https://www.wri.org/research/beyond-carbon-financing.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=World Resources Institute |title=Beyond Carbon Financing |url=https://www.wri.org/research/beyond-carbon-financing |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{worldresourcesinstitutendbeyond, author = {{World Resources Institute}}, title = {{Beyond Carbon Financing}}, institution = {World Resources Institute}, url = {https://www.wri.org/research/beyond-carbon-financing}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }