The World Bank’s Forest Investment Programme – the story so far

By Chris Lang | REDD Monitor | 20th July 2009

The World Bank is positioning itself as one of the major funders of REDD. One of the Bank’s funding mechanisms is the Forest Investment Program. So far, the FIP has held three design meetings.

Sena Alouka, Executive Director of Jeune Volontaires pour l’Environnement, Togo is one of the civil society representatives at the FIP meetings. He wrote the following account of the FIP so far in theGlobal Forest Coalition’s newsletter “Forest Cover“, July 2009.

A useful overview of the Forest Investment Program is available on the Heinrich Böll Foundation and Overseas Development Initiative’s website, climatefundsupdate.org. The World Bank’s FIP website, perhaps not surprisingly, is far less informative.

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Forest Investment Program Meets for Second Design Meeting

Sena Alouka, Executive Director, Jeunes Volontaires pour l’Environnement, Togo

The Bali Action Plan calls on parties to “consider policy approaches and positive incentives on issues relating to reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation [REDD] in developing countries; and the role of conservation, sustainable management of forests, and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries.” This call prompted the World Bank to set up several mechanisms through which it could provide the necessary funding for REDD plans being developed by several countries and multilateral institutions.

During the final design meeting of Bank’s Climate Investment Funds (CIF), held in Potsdam, in May 2008, it was agreed that “a forest investment program should be established by the end of 2008 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 FIP should be developed based on a broad and transparent consultative process. That process should take into account country led priority strategies for the containment of deforestation and degradation and build upon complementarities between existing forest initiatives.”

According to the World Bank, the main goal 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 is supposed to achieve all this by serving as a vehicle to finance large scale investments, promoting transformational change, generating understanding and learning of the links between investments and outcomes, and piloting replicable models to leverage additional and sustained financial resources for REDD.

Design meetings

The first design meeting for the development of the FIP was held in Washington DC, 16-17 October 2008. A working group experts’ meeting was then convened 8-9 January 2009, and a second design meeting organized on 5-6 March 2009. A third design meeting took place in Washington DC, 4-5 May, but no consensus could be reached, and the current version of the proposal stems from an online consultation organized by the FIP secretariat.

Arrangements made for civil society participation in these meetings has been haphazard at best. Some NGOs and Indigenous People were invited to the initial presentation meeting of the CIF in October 2008, thanks to the Development and Environment Group of BOND (British Overseas NGOs for Development) in the UK. Since then, IUCN has been asked to conduct a self-selection process to identify six civil society delegates from the various regions of the world. Another process was arranged for the selection of the Indigenous peoples’ delegate.

Participation in the second design meeting was particularly poorly organized. Because of the extremely late notice and failure to facilitate participants’ visa and travel arrangements in a timely fashion, civil society representatives who were duly elected to attend the FIP meeting, through a formalized selection process, were unable to take part in the end: the delegate from Togo, for example, got his ticket one hour before departure. Even for the lucky few who managed to attend, background materials and the agenda had not been circulated to all in advance, meaning that participants had had little time to review and prepare their inputs to the meeting, let alone consult their constituencies and solicit input in a meaningful manner. In the end, the civil society group wrote a joint letter to express its deep disappointment in the ongoing organization – or rather lack of organization – of the Forest Investment Programme (FIP) design meetings, which is making meaningful and broad civil society participation impossible.

This is of particular concern given that the majority of those unable to attend were from tropical forest countries – the very people whose voices, opinions, and knowledge are essential to ensure the success of measures to stop deforestation and forest degradation in those countries, and to guarantee respect for the rights and interests of forest-dependent communities. The joint letter queries the “sincerity of the World Bank Group’s stated commitment to ensure that the FIP is based on ‘a broad and transparent’ and ‘fully’ consultative process.”

Business-as-usual

Key issues that have been important for civil society participants have included the principles of the FIP, the Special Initiative for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, the level of transformational change the Bank and its acolytes are willing to reach, and the broad participation of civil society organizations and local communities. But it is ever clearer that the FIP could be business-as-usual. Several countries insisted on their need for development – the right to keep on logging – and their national sovereignty; but this approach risks reducing compliance, transparency and windows for broad participation from civil society organisations and Indigenous People.

Concerning the Special Initiative for Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities, civil society participants stressed that activities eligible for support should include capacity building; securing and strengthening customary land tenure, resource rights and traditional forest management systems of Indigenous Peoples and local communities; support for the development of pilot project proposals from Indigenous Peoples and local communities; and support for their involvement in monitoring and evaluating forest activities. Additionally, there is also a need to ensure that support for Indigenous Peoples and local communities is fully integrated into national forest-climate policy, REDD/FIP processes and investment plans. This means that activities supported through a dedicated mechanism should not be isolated or marginalized from the design and implementation of national REDD/FIP plans, nor should the existence of such a mechanism stop Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ accessing funds through other mechanisms or for other activities.

One point that has drawn a lot of attention is the “Illustrative Examples of Potential Investments under the FIP.” While this could be useful, civil society participants indicated their preference for an exclusion list, detailing activities that will not, under any circumstances, be supported by the FIP. As the FIP is designed to “support countries’ REDD-efforts” and maximize benefits of sustainable development, particularly in relation to biodiversity conservation, rural livelihoods, and ecosystem services, it should never be used to finance deforestation or forest degradation.

Concerns were also raised around Sustainable Forest Management, which may hide an intention to promote industrial-scale logging or ‘certification’ systems, plantations (monocultures, potentially including genetically modified trees), and destructive mining and infrastructure projects, with the pretention of making participation of civil them more sustainable.

In the end, for the FIP to be truly transformative, it should support efforts to reduce demand for wood and agricultural products altogether, and halt the production and purchase of products derived from degraded or converted forests, as well as conserving intact or primary natural forests – not just ‘high conservation value or pristine forests.’ CSOs decided to participate in the FIP sub-committee as active observers, rather than full members, to avoid the possibility of legitimizing harmful projects. In general, however, they were relatively satisfied with the openness of the FIP secretariat and the positive attitude displayed by several participants (apart from some developing country governments that seem to regard the FIP as a means of financing and legitimizing industrial logging).

Finally, taking into consideration the sunset clause in the CIF, which obliges it to come to an end by 2012 (unless otherwise requested by the UNFCCC), there is reason to ask about the relevance of the FIP as well, since most institutions, are already calling for a redrafting of the REDD or REDD+. Fingers are crossed that future meetings address these profound concerns, before the FIP’s Design Document is finally validated by the Strategic Climate Fund Trust Committee.

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