To inform policy dialogues on addressing tropical deforestation and inclusive growth, the International Partnerships Facility has developed and contributed to a number of open-source tools on land-use planning, land-use finance and transparency in commodity trade. These tools are designed to be mastered quickly, through self-learning or training.
The Land-use Planner is an interactive economic tool to inform land-use planning processes. It helps stakeholders develop land-use scenarios in a simple and participatory way, compare social, economic and environmental impacts, and estimate the costs and benefits of policy decisions. It helps inform land-use decisions at jurisdictional level and can assist transitions to deforestation-free commodity production for a given territory or supply chain. The Land-use Planner has been used in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and the Republic of the Congo have started to engage with the tool.
The Land-use Finance Tool offers methodological guidelines to countries, jurisdictions and their partners to map public and private investments that support forest and climate objectives, and those which might be driving deforestation. Comprehensive quantitative and qualitative analysis of land-use investments is a key step to building robust REDD+ investment frameworks. Such analysis can also help leverage additional sources of funding, and support efforts to coordinate and align spending towards climate objectives. Côte d’Ivoire, Cambodia, Papua New Guinea and Vietnam have used the Tool to test this approach. The Tool’s guidelines are available for download.
The Transparency Pathway is a collaborative method to manage sustainability risks in complex global supply chains at scale. It brings together stakeholders at all points of the supply chain – including governments, companies and civil society – to lay the foundation for improving sustainability and to inform trade dialogues. It charts six pragmatic steps that are designed to make collaboration between public and private supply chain actors more impactful and inclusive, while reducing costs and gaining positive visibility in global commodity markets. Incremental information disclosure is used as a mechanism to reduce information asymmetry among actors, improve governance and support increased accountability.
Trase is an online platform that improves the transparency, clarity and accessibility of information on the commodity supply chains that drive tropical deforestation. It provides a comprehensive overview of the flows of commodities from producer to consumer countries. It details information on specific actors, conditions and risks in particular supply chains. Trase is a global initiative led by the Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy, to which EFI is a partner. EFI supports interested governments in harnessing such transparency for monitoring risks and opportunities in commodity production and trade.
The Forest Governance Index (FGI) is a key tool for assessing and monitoring the governance areas relevant to the management, protection, and conservation of forests, such as stakeholder participation, legislative and institutional clarity, accountability and oversight, transparency, and compliance, promotion and enforcement, based on evidence rather than perceptions. In applying the FGI, the IPF has engaged national experts and stakeholders in their evaluation of forest governance at the national level. This collaborative process can help stakeholders to track the evolution of governance over time and see the influence of policy processes on these key areas.