Sri Lanka has been admitted to the United Nations initiative on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation in Developing Countries (REDD) Programme.

Sri Lanka’s membership comes amid a call by Dr. Palitha Kohona, Sri Lanka’s Permanent Representative to the UN at the UN General Assembly’s Second Committee that “sufficient incentives must be provided to forest hosting countries to maintain them” and “to ascribe a carbon value to natural forests, enabling that carbon value to be traded in the global carbon market”.

The programme aims at generating up to thirty billion US Dollars in annual funding from developed countries with already promising commitments from Denmark, Norway and Australia. More than thirty seven million US Dollars REDD funding was approved last year for mitigation programmes in Panama, Tanzania, Congo and Viet Nam.

The significant flow of REDD funds has been described as a reward for the meaningful reduction of carbon emissions and in support of new, pro-poor development programmes, conservation of biodiversity and securing vital ecosystem services.

The UN REDD was launched as a collaborative partnership between the Food & Agricultural Organisation (FAO), the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP). The UN REDD was designed to help countries combat climate change by reducing deforestation and investing in sustainable development.

Several multilateral agencies such as the World Bank and the Global Environment Facility (GEF) are collaborating on UN REDD with numerous other entities including the Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, regional development banks, bilateral donors, research institutions and NGOs.

Along with Sri Lanka, Argentina, Cambodia, Ecuador and Nepal were accepted as new UN REDD partners, increasing the total membership to fourteen.