Another meeting of the Steering Committee of the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF) has not been held since the first one in November last year.
At that meeting, a tentative mid-January date had been set for the second Steering Committee meeting. The GRIF is the financial mechanism for the ongoing cooperation on climate change between Guyana and Norway, in which Oslo will pay up to US$250 million for Guyana’s performance on limiting greenhouse gas emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and for progress made against governance-related indicators. Guyana will invest the payments it receives, and any income earned on them, in its Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).
It is expected that the concept notes for several projects to be funded through the GRIF are to be submitted to the Steering Committee within the first quarter of this year. An outline for the Amerindian Land Titling and Demarcation project is the only one out of six due to be funded through the GRIF, that is available on the LCDS website. The committee has to approve the project before funding can be disbursed.
The World Bank is the Trustee for the GRIF and when contacted yesterday, its Country Representative Giorgio Valentini said Guyana and Norway are the ones who decide when there would be another meeting of the Steering Committee and the secretariat would then notify the trustee and relevant partners. This has not happened and Valentini could not say when the next meeting will be held.
Meanwhile, a report by the Rainforest Alliance programme which recently completed the verification of enabling activities for the Guyana-Norway agreement has not been posted on the LCDS website despite Agriculture Minister Robert Persaud telling the National Assembly when he quoted from the document during the Budget debate last week that it was “publicly available”.
Meantime, the team from Norway that is currently in Guyana continued to meet government and civil society representatives yesterday. Meetings were held with the partner entities of the GRIF, including the World Bank, yesterday.
