Ensuring that the poor or the most vulnerable sections of society benefit from REDD+ projects is crucial to building both national and international legitimacy and to fostering successful delivery of conservation and social objectives. In both academic and non-academic literature, issues of the equity of benefit-sharing at a community or household level are overlooked compared with distributional issues at the national and international level. Therefore, this paper aims to look at some of the issues related to benefit distribution at village and household level.

This volume of case studies comprises one of two main publications resulting from the Oct. 21-22, 2011 Land Tenure and Forest Carbon Management Workshop hosted by the University of Wisconsin/Madison’s Land Tenure Center (LTC), Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies, and Geography Dept. Contributed by an impressive array of researchers, NGOs, and other development partners, these cases are intended to complement a set of research papers being prepared simultaneously for a forthcoming special issue of World Development.

This paper examines the legal framework of Protected Areas (PAs) in Nepal - that includes several types and categories of PAs such as national parks, wildlife reserves, conservation areas and buffer zones. Laws concerning PAs are examined against the contexts of international agreements, conventions, and accepted standards as well as the national ground realities.

This briefing gives an overview of the key REDD+ issues, in particular: integrating mitigation and adaptation actions; addressing tenure; learning from participatory forest management and payment for ecosystems services; taking the right approach to gender; developing safeguards to minimize negative impacts of REDD+; and strengthening South-South collaboration to reduce the transaction costs of REDD+.

In light of the adoption of the Nagoya Protocol, it is important for countries that have or are in the process of putting in place national ABS measures to share their experiences in implementation. Drawing upon practical experience with ABS will greatly assist in highlighting where regulatory gaps exist, what the strengths and weaknesses of different approaches to ABS are, and where international rules will be of assistance.