CBFP's members have committed themselves to improving the effectiveness of financial and technical contributions for the conservation and sustainable management of forest ecosystems in the Congo Basin. At the same time, a crucial part of international efforts to address climate change is the money to assist developing countries in growing their economies without explosive increases in emissions, and in helping them adapt to a changing climate which they did little to create.  As reduced emissions through avoided deforestation and degradation starts to play a pre-eminent role during current negociations for a new climate protocole, we need a thourough understanding of the importance and the relative  performane of REDD related projects in overall climate aid schemes.  

A new paper on The Reality of Official Climate Aid by J. Timmons Roberts, Kara Starr, Thomas Jones, and Dinah Abdel-Fattah. (Oxford Institute for Energy Studies, Energy and Environment Comment, November 2008)  provides preliminary findings on trends in climate aid from the world's major donor nations from 2000 to 2006 based on individual categorization of over 115,000 aid projects randomly selected from the OECD/CRS database.

As they raise the question about the eventually negative climate impact of those mitigation projects that still receive the biggest part of international funding (large-scale hydroelectric projects), the authors underline the need for adequate adaptation funding, i.e. projects that seek to take direct action to adapt to climate change including environmental monitoring and reducing vulnerability. CBFP's members already respond to this call and contribute at large to programmes aiming at forest monitoring and resource knowledge. The study's data further shows that mitigation projects using alternative methods that are supposed to lessen the impact on climate change, including carbon sequestering, avoided deforestation and afforestation receive the smallest part of funding among the mitigation projects even though they are the ones contributing most directly to actually avoid further emissions.

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