1 July 2014, UN-REDD news - Over 100 people attended a reception on 15 May 2014 at the United Nations Headquarters in New York to celebrate the launch of Community-Based REDD+ (CBR+), a new partnership between the UN-REDD Programme and the UNDP-GEF Small Grants Programme (SGP), which was approved by the UN-REDD Programme Policy Board at the tenth Policy Board meeting in June 2013.

Made possible through the generous contribution  of US$ 4 million from the government of Norway, and co-financed by SGP, CBR+  will provide grants of up to US$ 50,000 directly to indigenous peoples and  local communities to empower them to fully engage in the design, implementation  and monitoring of REDD+ readiness activities, and to develop experiences,  lessons and recommendations at the local level that can feed into national  REDD+ processes.

As UNDP  Senior Policy Advisor Charles McNeill explained, CBR+ will support community-level  projects that complement UN-REDD National Programmes, national REDD+ readiness  processes and/or national REDD+ strategies. CBR+ is currently being piloted in  six countries: Cambodia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Nigeria, Panama,  Paraguay and Sri Lanka. Preparatory activities, including the development of  CBR+ country plans for each pilot country and the formation of CBR+ national  steering committees, are currently underway, with the first grants expected to  be disbursed in late 2014.

In recognition  of the strong role indigenous peoples played in driving the development of this  new body of work, the launch was held during the United Nations Permanent Forum  on Indigenous Issues (UNPFII), and a number of prominent indigenous leaders  took to the podium to applaud CBR+ and encourage indigenous peoples and  communities to take full advantage of this opportunity to amplify their voices  in REDD+ processes.

Joan  Carling, Secretary General of the Asia Indigenous Peoples Pact, praised CBR+ as  a way to bridge the gap between local communities and international level  processes, and expressed her hope that CBR+ would facilitate greater  involvement of indigenous peoples in REDD+ processes. Kanyinke Sena, Former  Chair of UNPFII and Former UN-REDD Programme Policy Board member emphasized  that indigenous peoples and forest communities should be at the frontline of  REDD+, and called on indigenous peoples to take full advantage of the  opportunity CBR+ presents. He also expressed his hope that the initiative could  be expanded in the near future to serve a greater range of countries.

Rounding up  the formal remarks, SGP Global Manager Delfin Ganapin emphasized that REDD+  needs to be supported from the grassroots as well as from the top, and pointed  to CBR+ as a key element in ensuring that this is the case.

Source: http://www.un-redd.org/Newsletter2014Issue3/CommunityBasedREDDLaunch/tabid/133462/Default.aspx