Guyana will receive US$200,000 ($40M) from the Forest Carbon Partner-ship Facility (FCPF) to prepare its Readiness Plan (R-Plan) for combating tropical deforestation.
The Ministry of Agri-culture, in a press release yesterday said that the sum will be immediately available.
The R-Plan will outline among other activities, the methodologies to be used in carrying out assessments of historical and current emissions from deforestation and forest degradation at a national level.
It will also look at mechanisms to project and model future emissions from deforestation and degradation, and to update biomass field estimates across all land uses, both of which will be done at the national level.
“This process will involve additional extensive consultations with all stakeholders groups, especially local community residents who are an important target group in the effort to reduce deforestation and forest degradation through the use of sustainable alternative economic activities and payments for reduced emissions”, the statement said.
On Monday, the World Bank named Guyana as one of 14 developing countries selected as the first states to receive money for combating tropical deforestation and climate change from an initial US$82M partnership be-tween those countries and nine industrialized states.
The other countries to benefit are the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Gabon, Ghana, Kenya, Liberia, Madagascar, Bolivia, Costa Rica, Mexico, Panama, Nepal, the Lao People’s Democratic Republic and Vietnam.
The countries will receive initial funding from the FCPF, an innovative approach to financing efforts to combat climate change.
The FCPF aims to reduce deforestation and forest degradation by compensating developing countries for greenhouse gas emission reductions.
The 14 tropical and sub-tropical countries will receive grant support as they build their capacity to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD) and tap into future systems of positive incentives for REDD.
The World Bank statement had stressed that the grant money being provided to the 14 countries in the FCPF will help them to prepare for future systems of positive incentives for REDD, in particular by establishing emissions reference levels, adopting REDD strategies, and designing monitoring systems. It added that developing countries have expressed a strong interest in participating in the FCPF and it is expected that more countries will receive support in the coming months.
At their meeting last December in Bali, the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change agreed to start demonstration activities on REDD.
The FCPF, which was announced by the World Bank at the Bali Conference, will help to finance some of these demonstration activities, the statement said.
