Evaluating the impacts of REDD+ interventions on livelihoods, social equity and effectiveness

Globally, deforestation and forest and peatland degradation account for around 15% of total anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions. Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD+) could be a cost-effective way of reducing this figure. Discussion on REDD+ has focused largely on the institutional architectures required to channel international finance streams to individual countries, neglecting how these funds will be used at the national level to encourage behavioural change. For REDD+ to work, benefits must flow through a long chain of actors, from national, regional and local governments, industries and businesses, to farmer groups and indigenous communities. The factors influencing decision-making at the lowest level—households—need to be well understood in order to design effective REDD+ interventions. In this paper, we discuss preliminary results from two agent-based models (representing tropical highland and lowland localities) looking into the likely impacts of REDD+ initiatives on land-use choices and their implications for local livelihoods. Our findings suggest that REDD+ could have significant repercussions for food prices, rents and wages, benefiting large landowners living in urban areas, while disadvantaging village households, particularly the landless.