A storyline in the NBC sitcom “The Good Place” results in all humanity being damned to “The Bad Place” because the nature of modern life ─ not least our seemingly innate, hyper-consumptive human nature ─ means we cannot avoid negative impacts on the planet and all others who live here.

Is this the reality of modern life? That just by shopping, eating and even living we are doing harm to the planet? The preponderance of palm oil and soybeans in the products we use, and our ever-increasing consumption of animal proteins is undeniably and historically linked to deforestation, environmental degradation and greenhouse gas emissions. Our car miles, flights, and our air heating and cooling requirements certainly result in damaging greenhouse gas emissions. And undoubtedly, many companies egregiously maltreat both their own workers and the local communities from which they source.

Yet the negative impact of modern consumption is not inevitable. Thanks largely to consumer pressure, commodity producers are now paying attention and making commitments to protect animal welfare, workers’ rights, and to reduce single-use plastics, water pollution and greenhouse gas emissions. And modern technology and instant international communication mean it is now easier to track what companies are doing and to hold them to account.

Focusing just on greenhouse gas emissions: Have a look at any given producer’s website under the sustainability section. There is a good chance you will now see listed a greenhouse gas ambition, perhaps under a “science-based targets” or other similarly described initiative. Huge multinational companies including the likes of Nestlé, Tyson and Unilever have publicly committed to net zero emissions by 2050; in other words, to balance any emissions with equivalent carbon sequestration or other offsets either through investments local to their supply chains (known as insets), or through the carbon market. Companies including Netflix are working toward carbon neutrality almost immediately, while in extremes cases, others like Microsoft have committed to canceling out all emissions stretching back to startup.

Therefore, we should not feel condemned to a ”Bad Place” of irredeemable guilt in our modern habits of consumption. Making important pledges does not equate to actual positive impact, and companies must be held accountable to keep their commitments and demonstrate they have done so with high-quality quantification, such as through the verification methodology used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body responsible for advancing knowledge of human-induced climate change. In this year already full of anxiety due to accelerating climate change and extraordinary, seemingly endless, rounds of natural disasters, we must not cease to demand high ambition and action from the companies we live alongside, and we must hold companies to account to meet their pledges.

This year’s annual meeting of the U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow (COP26) can be an opportunity to move away from our collective guilt and climate anxiety ─ which the IPCC’s recent 6^th Assessment Report no doubt greatly amplified ─ towards taking collective action against greenhouse gas emissions and reversing the damage we have done to the Earth’s climate.

What can we consumers do? I urge you, for any companies whose products play an important role in your kitchen, your bathroom, your travel, your home life or your wardrobe: Go to their websites to see what they have achieved already in terms of sustainability, and what they pledge to achieve in the future. And make decisions on how you spend your money based on the ambition and achievements of these companies. If we do this together, today, we can get to a better place.

In a few days, nations across the globe will convene at the 26^th U.N. Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow to accelerate actions to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and keep global warming below 2 degrees Celsius, and preferably below 1.5 ⁰C.

The outcomes of COP26 will be critical, especially in light of the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s recent Sixth Assessment Report: The Physical Science Basis. Those findings present a dire warning, based on the most up-to-date physical science, that transformational change is essential to avoid the most catastrophic effects of climate change. The report finds that global surface temperatures have risen approximately 1.1 ⁰C since pre-industrial times, and are expected to reach 1.5 ⁰C within the next 20 years. To limit warming to 1.5 ⁰C  and avoid the associated additional negative impacts, “immediate, rapid, and large-scale reductions” in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions are necessary.

That’s where the Climate Pathway Project comes into play. This project was financed by Norway’s International Climate and Forests Initiative, managed by The Climate Group, and implemented under the technical coordination and leadership of Winrock International, with expertise from the Center for Climate Strategies and partners including the Governors’ Climate and Forests Task Force, World Wildlife Fund, Reforestamos Mexico and and Libélula. The Climate Pathway Project assisted six state and regional governments in Latin America to develop long-term plans, or pathways, to reduce GHG emissions in different sectors and to enhance removals at scale, while promoting continued socio-economic development opportunities. Subnational governments play key roles in implementing public policies and promoting change at a more localized level, fulfilling an important role in helping to meet national commitments under the Paris Agreement.

The participating subnationals included the states of Amazonas, Mato Grosso, and São Paulo in Brazil; Querétaro and Quintana Roo in Mexico; and Madre de Dios in Peru. In the decarbonization pathways, these states and regions each elected a suite of priority actions to reduce net GHG emissions while also maximizing socio-economic and environmental benefits.

The scope of these actions varied significantly, from improving energy efficiency, strengthening land tenure rights, combating deforestation and optimizing industrial processes, to restoring forest cover in the productive agricultural landscape. Implementing all priority actions determined by the six participants and their stakeholders is expected to lead to emission reductions of 339 million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (CO₂e) in 2030, a 53% reduction compared to the “business-as-usual” (BAU) scenario, and reductions of 735 million tonnes in 2050, an 87% reduction compared to the BAU scenario.

While these projected emission reductions are a fraction of the total ambition needed at the global level, the project provides an important framework to guide subnational jurisdictions and other stakeholders in development of their own tailored decarbonization pathways. More governments and private sector entities are making commitments to reduce or even achieve net zero emissions. To turn commitments into reality however, they must continue to define their decarbonization pathways, refine plans for achieving them, and begin implementing those plans. This is a substantive undertaking that requires cooperation and organization across diverse stakeholders and high levels of expertise.

With the Climate Pathway Project, Winrock and its partners demonstrated that it can be done. More subnational and national governments must follow the lead of these six states and regions and develop their decarbonization pathways; the lessons learned under this project provide a strong foundation to do so.

For more information on the Climate Pathway Project including reports and updates, click here.

Originally published by Ecosystem Marketplace, a Forest Trends Initiative.

The Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) has released an expanded and enhanced version of The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard (TREES) for measuring, monitoring, verifying and crediting climate progress in the forest sector. The updated version – TREES 2.0 – broadens opportunities to unlock large-scale solutions from forests in support of efforts by the international community to achieve the ambitious goals in the Paris Agreement.

In the fight against climate change, the urgency of reducing deforestation, restoring and regrowing forests and protecting intact ecosystems in areas with low historic rates of deforestation is well understood. Scientists estimate that these natural climate solutions can provide one-third of needed climate action this decade.

The Paris Agreement paved the way for large-scale climate solutions from forests by endorsing international cooperation to protect and enhance forest carbon stocks and reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, collectively known as REDD+. However, a major barrier to mobilizing large-scale finance has been the lack of a high-integrity, standardized approach for the measurement, monitoring, reporting, verification and crediting of emission reductions and carbon removals from forests at a jurisdictional scale, including the assurance of environmental and social safeguards.

ART was created to meet this challenge with the objective of attracting finance at scale to support ambitious climate action in the forest sector by countries and large sub-national jurisdictions (such as provinces or states) by ensuring that TREES emission reduction and removals credits are comparable across jurisdictions and fungible in carbon markets with credits from other sectors. The first version of TREES, released in 2020, focused on ensuring the integrity of credits for emission reductions from reduced deforestation and forest degradation – the most urgent priority for the forest sector.

TREES 2.0 includes innovations to broaden access to and activities covered by forest carbon crediting, while maintaining rigorous safeguards. TREES 2.0 expands options for participating jurisdictions to access carbon market financing by including crediting for additional mitigation actions from the forest sector, notably (i) protecting forests in jurisdictions with high forest cover and low rates of deforestation and (ii) enhancing carbon ‘removals’ due to reforestation and forest restoration efforts. It also creates a pathway to recognize the contributions of Indigenous Peoples to protecting forests and reducing associated emissions.

Specifically:

• TREES 2.0 expands jurisdictional-scale crediting for forest restoration and the establishment of new forests – which remove carbon from the atmosphere – adding another critical solution to help drive transformational change in the forest sector and achieve the goals of the Paris Agreement.
• TREES 2.0 adds an innovative crediting approach for jurisdictions that have historically protected their forests. These are areas that have high forest cover and low levels of deforestation (also known as High-Forest, Low Deforestation (HFLD) jurisdictions). Incentivizing jurisdictions to keep their forests standing creates a more effective and equitable global system for forest protection and restoration.
• TREES 2.0 creates a new opportunity for Indigenous Peoples – who provide a critical global service as effective forest protectors – to contribute and benefit. Indigenous Peoples territories are eligible to aggregate as subnational accounting areas as part of a national submission to ART to meet the required scale threshold. In addition, these subnational Indigenous Peoples territories are eligible to qualify as HFLD and therefore elect to use the TREES 2.0’s HFLD crediting approach to better reflect their historical performance in protecting their forests.

ART has also clarified requirements to avoid double counting and improved requirements around uncertainty, while also enhancing clarity for how project-level activities can fit within a jurisdictional approach, as well as how TREES operationalizes the social and environmental safeguards defined by the United Nations Framework Convention for Climate Change (UNFCCC) for the implementation of REDD+ activities – known commonly as the Cancun Safeguards.

Specifically:

• TREES 2.0 clarifies provisions to avoid double counting under the Carbon Offsetting and Reduction Scheme for International Aviation (CORSIA) and the Paris Agreement’s Article 6.2 (which provides an accounting framework for international cooperation to achieve national climate goals). It also clarifies situations in which credits issued for use in domestic compliance markets may not be considered double issued with TREES credits.
• ART has also clarified that while ART does not directly credit projects or similar smaller-scale activities, ART recognizes that Participants will work with the private sector, Indigenous Peoples and local communities (IPLCs) and other stakeholders to design and implement successful REDD+ programs. To complement TREES 2.0, ART recently published a paper detailing Options for Nesting Under ART.

Despite universal agreement on the essential role of forests in achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement and reversing the worst effects of global warming, they are being lost at alarming rates. We urgently need to mobilize capital at scale for protecting and restoring tropical forests. By expanding access to carbon market finance, our goal with TREES 2.0 is to unlock such large-scale action from the forest sector.

When discussing the careers of women leaders, there’s a phenomenon referred to as the “glass cliff.” A relative of the term glass ceiling, the “glass cliff” is when a company is in trouble and a female leader is put in charge to save it. The notion suggests that when women are finally given a chance to prove themselves in a senior position, they are handed something that is already broken where the chances of failure are high. One might argue that women thrive as leaders in times of crisis – but why must we wait until times of crisis to showcase women’s leadership?

In recent studies of countries and states in the U.S. where women leaders have been more successful than their male counterparts at reducing COVID-19 transmission, unbalanced levels of women’s leadership have been connected with greater risks of creating COVID-19 response plans that do not consider the disproportionate impact of the pandemic on women and girls, and of failing to implement policies that support them, according to CARE.  Well beyond heads of state, women’s leadership has contributed significantly to managing the pandemic in schools, communities, workplaces and homes.

After attending school for the first time at an accelerated schooling center in Mali made possible by a Winrock project, Sali Kassogue now attends a government school. Photo: Winrock International

Despite what we have seen in terms of a formidable response from women’s leadership during the pandemic, systemic barriers, gender bias, discrimination and gender stereotypes still pack a devastating blow. An estimated 132 million girls are not attending school (though Winrock is doing its part to ensure that they do so), and, within the next decade, 140 million girls will be married before they reach the age of 18. In fact, if current trends persist, it will take an estimated 108 years to close the global gender gap.

Arkansas Women’s Business Center Director Chauncey Pettis, left, with two of the center’s clients. Photo: Dave Anderson

In addition to persistent pre-existing social and systemic barriers to women’s participation and leadership, new barriers have emerged with the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the world women are facing increased domestic violence, unpaid care duties, unemployment and poverty. Unfortunately, despite women making up a majority of front-line workers, there is disproportionate and inadequate representation of women in national and global COVID-19 policy spaces. In the context of our programming and organizational culture, the gap in women’s leadership must be prioritized in order to address long-term hurdles, such as:

• Workforce Participation. In September 2020, four times as many women as men dropped out of the labor force in the United States (865,000 women compared with 216,000 men). In fact, one out of four women who reported becoming unemployed during the pandemic said it was because of a lack of childcare, twice the rate of men. Winrock recognizes the importance of family-forward workplace policies to address the challenges of this moment brought on by the pandemic and has sought to implement more flexibility for working parents’ caretaking responsibilities in our commitment to advancing gender equality.
• Climate Change. Women and girls have been leading climate action and environmental movements, but men still occupy 67 percent of climate-related decision-making roles. Women across the world are disproportionately affected by climate change, and climate-induced humanitarian disasters often worsen existing gender inequalities, leaving women and girls prone to higher rates of violence, malnutrition and more. In the context of our programming in climate change adaptation, we seek to empower women leaders in the climate movement so that solutions and responses to the climate emergency won’t continue to exclude women’s needs and undermine their rights.
• Agriculture. Women ensure food security and build climate resilience, but when it comes to owning land, accessing agricultural inputs, financing and technologies for climate resilience, they are left far behind. Since more than one-third of women’s employment is in agriculture, increasing women’s access to land and providing better support for women farmers is essential. Within our robust agriculture portfolio Winrock strives to promote women’s experience and insights to lead us all to a better understanding of managing scarce resources, promoting innovation and mitigating climate risks.
• Entrepreneurship and the Workplace. Despite a record-breaking new high of women CEOs of Fortune 500 companies in 2020, only 7.4 percent of companies on the list are run by women, and women are less likely to be entrepreneurs (something Winrock works to counteract). Intersecting and multiple forms of discriminatory practices such as sexual harassment, the gender wage gap and lack of family-friendly policies at the workplace keep women from advancing in their careers and claiming leadership positions.
• Women’s Rights Organizations. Around the world, the space for civil discourse and movements is shrinking. Since 2008, civil society repression has deepened in 26 countries worldwide, thus creating obstacles for women’s organizations and movements to register, engage in advocacy and receive external funding in some countries. Winrock partners with women’s rights organizations because their role is critical in teaching the next generation the importance of gender equality and supporting girls’ activism.

Winrock’s African Women Leaders in Agriculture and the Environment program, of which these women were a part, awarded 570 African women scholarships for post-graduate training in agriculture, equipped over 1,500 women with leadership skills, enabled more than 50,000 girls to pursue their educations and provided training to 100,000 women farmers in new technologies.

Women stand at the front lines of the COVID-19 crisis, as health care workers, caregivers, innovators, community organizers and as some of the most exemplary and effective leaders in combating the pandemic. The crisis has highlighted both the centrality of their contributions and the disproportionate burdens that they carry.

Women have emerged as leaders of trafficking survivor groups, and they use their hard-won experience to educate and protect others. Photo: Misty Keasler

Our world will never be the same after COVID-19. If we are going to be realistic about building back better, we have to be honest about what’s broken now. COVID did not create new inequalities; it highlighted and exacerbated existing ones. What has been glaringly clear is that women, particularly women of color and women from low-income communities and from the Global South, do not have the same level of power and agency in their communities. To uphold women’s rights and fully leverage the potential of women’s leadership in pandemic preparedness and response, the perspectives of women and girls in all of their diversity must be integrated in the formulation and implementation of policies and programs.

As Shirley Chisholm, the first Black U.S. congresswoman and first Black majority party candidate to run for president once said: “If they don’t give you a seat at the table, bring a folding chair.” The future is better with women at every table where decisions are being made — from the kitchen table to the conference room table. We must continue to amplify women’s voices to ensure a future where women’s leadership is no longer an exception but the norm.

In 2018, under the USAID-funded Vietnam Forests and Deltas Project, Microsoft and Winrock began an exciting partnership. The goal: to harness data across environmental and social indicators to help the Government of Vietnam better understand the impact of its innovative Payments for Forest Environmental Services (PFES) system.

PFES pays upstream forest owners to maintain healthy forests, a unique example of private-sector engagement that benefits downstream water users such as hydroelectric power plants and industrial water users. To monitor PFES, the Vietnam Forest Protection and Development Fund (VNFF) initially only collected data on the number of households receiving PFES payments, the dollar value of those payments and the hectares of forests under the system. As the PFES system developed, Winrock, USAID and VNFF wanted a more robust way to capture the true impact of this work on the ecosystems and livelihoods of those involved.

VNFF set out on a multipronged effort to improve their overall PFES monitoring and evaluation system. They reviewed what data they wanted to collect, how they wanted to collect it, and how they could ensure all users access to the information they needed. VNFF and its provincial partners identified 28 indicators that could help capture the impact of the system and allow decision-makers to see the results of PFES on forests and forest communities. For example, VNFF will now be able to analyze forest loss data to compare areas where forest owners receive PFES payments and areas where they do not and track how PFES funds are distributed — whether to community-level forest patrols, local infrastructure development or community initiatives such as women-led savings funds.

Of course, collecting and compiling all this information is a major undertaking and so when Microsoft reached out to the project to see how it could help, there was a clear answer! Microsoft provided financial support and access to leading local software developers, who worked with Winrock and VNFF to develop the database infrastructure and data management system to allow VNFF to process the information they needed. As the PFES system in Vietnam is globally unique, the database infrastructure and management needed to be specifically tailored for this use, and Microsoft was crucial for the development of this system.

“USAID/Vietnam has been looking for opportunities to work with Microsoft, and it’s great that PFES monitoring provided an opportunity for successful private sector engagement,” said former USAID/Vietnam Mission Director Michael Greene.

In partnership with Winrock, VNFF finalized and institutionalized the National PFES M&E Guidelines to establish consistent monitoring and evaluation processes and procedures across all 44 provinces that participate in PFES. Using the new guidelines, Winrock and VNFF trained national and provincial-level staff on their roles and responsibilities in the new system.

“Thanks to the M&E system developed by VFD, Son La province can quantify PFES results and evaluate the effectiveness of the PFES policy. The new guidelines are essential to help other provinces navigate and institute their own M&E systems,” says Mr. Phung Huu Thu, who heads Son La Provincial Forest Protection and Development Fund’s M&E Department.

As the Winrock-Microsoft partnership moves forward, VNFF will have nuanced data on the impacts of the $130 million annual payments that move through the PFES system. And this will make PFES stronger for all who use it.