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As the climate change dust settles after the remarkable success of the Paris UNFCCC meeting at the end of last year that adopted a globally inclusive ‘Paris Agreement’, it’s clear that REDD has been overtaken by the broader sustainable development agenda. While all the elements needed to establish a REDD mechanism have finally been put in place by the meetings from Cancun in 2011 to Paris in 2015, it was a sustainable development mechanism—and not a REDD mechanism—that was established in the Paris Agreement. That sustainable development has now taken centre stage in the minds of the international community is a wonderfully positive thing for improving the lot of poorer people in poorer countries—but it does not bode well for the fate of the countless other species with whom we share this planet. REDD now the ‘Cinderella’ of the broader Sustainable Development agenda Following Paris, we’re trying to persuade the Turnbull Government to come up with a joint Environment/Foreign Affairs initiative that would keep faith with both the Paris Agreement and the original intent of REDD—to keep faith with Australian public support for saving tropical rainforests by seeking out and supporting those sustainable development initiatives that include elements of protecting intact natural forests. We’ve been suggesting that such an initiative would fit well into attempts to improve diplomatic relations with neighbouring Indonesia, especially by making more assistance available to help reduce forest peat fires—a huge air pollution problem of local, regional and global significance. ‘REDD’ stands for ‘reduced emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries’—the decision of the Bali UNFCCC meeting in 2007 to set up an international mechanism to facilitatepayments tocommunities within developing countries to support them in choosing low carbon development pathways that included keeping and protecting their remaining natural forests. Unfortunately, while ‘saving tropical rainforests’ was (and remains) publicly popular in many developed countries,makingithappenonthe groundindevelopingcountries remains a challenge. This comes asnosurpriseasestablishedvestedinterests, especially industrial wood users directly interested in continuing forest degradation, strongly resist such moves. stocks. This was formalised at the 2011 Cancun meeting where this broader scope became known as ‘REDD+’ covering all manner of land management to put carbon back in the landscape, not just protecting the carbon already accumulated in natural forests. The story of the rise and decline of the REDD mechanism is set out very well in a 2016 Guide for UNFCCC negotiators produced by the NGO, Vertic. The address for downloading the Guide is: http://www.vertic.org/media/assets/Publications/VB26.pdf See box for the Paris Agreement text of Article 5 and part of Article 6.Notethat Article5describesREDD+butonlyencourages individual states to ‘take action’ whereas Article 6 formally establishes ‘a mechanism to contribute to mitigation of green - house gas emissions and support sustainable development…’. Saving remaining intact forests is still an eligible activity under the new mechanism but it’s nobody’s priority. Shying away began as soon as the ink dried CIFOR, the Indonesia-based Centre for International Forestry Research (the forestry node of a major net - work of international agricultural industry research centres, CGIAR) has been one of the main drivers of this ‘old is new’ approach to forest management. They have just issued a new ten-year strategy, ‘Stepping up to the new climate and development agenda’, that seeks to interpret the UN’s As a result, it has become much easier to get broad agreement to restore degraded areas than to prevent degradation of remaining intact areas in the first place. Governments are thus open to charges of impropriety and hypocrisy—they allocate taxpayers money in the name of saving rainforests but actually spend it on something else. This process of shying away from the hard job of protecting natural forests began as soon as the ink was dry on the 2007 Bali decision such that, when the Copenhagen meeting rolled round in 2010, the scope of REDD had been expanded to embrace: not only a) Reducing emissions from deforestation; and b) Reducing emissions from forest degradation; but also c) Conservation of forest carbon stocks; d) Sustainable management of forests; and, e) Enhancement of forest carbon Sustainable Development Goals in line with its ambitions for the management of the developing world’s forests: “CIFOR’s research will assess the goals and scope of private sector-driven sustainability standards and commitments— including certification, zero deforestation and legal supply initiatives. Our main focus is on agricultural and tree-crop commodities whose expansion places significant pressure on forests (e.g. oil palm, sugar, soy, beef), and on those with the potential to improve smallholder’s livelihoods (e.g. cacao, coffee, rubber).” “We will work on three main research streams in forest landscape restoration: (i) increasing the sustainability of restored forests; (ii) balancing interests in multi-scale, multi-actor forest restoration and use; and (iii) enhancing ecosystem service supply using forest landscape restoration through better processes of prioritization and socioecological mapping. (p.25)” 2