Review of funds which aim to protect tropical forests

This report was prepared for the Open Society Foundation. The report was commissioned to provide an analysis of existing funds that are designed to protect tropical forests. Its purpose is to inform discussions on a potential new global fund.

Forests are critical to the global environment - sequestering carbon, maintaining vital hydrological cycles and housing the majority of terrestrial biodiversity. But they also directly contribute to the livelihoods of more than 1.4 billion of the world’s poor.

Climate change measures and poverty reduction goals can be reconciled and achieved in both high and low forest countries if the poor can become involved in the architecture of avoided deforestation, forest restoration and agricultural intensification - both in subsistence and cash-crop settings. This approach could lead to increasing and diversifying agricultural-forest productivity in culturally appropriate ways (to meet the estimated need for 70 per cent more food by 2050) to bring hundreds of millions out of poverty, while limiting temperature rises to 2ºC to avoid catastrophic climate change in which the poor would be hardest hit.

In search of this outcome, this report concludes that there is space and demand for a substantial new forest-climate-poverty fund that will go to scale in much the same way that the Global Fund to fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria has gone to scale in the health arena.