Abstract
Voluntary commitments are playing an ever-greater role in environmental governance at all scales. In the years preceding the signing of the Paris Agreement in 2015, a flurry of non-state and state actors signed on to various declarations and commitments to reduce deforestation as one globally significant climate mitigation solution. This paper focuses on the Rio Branco Declaration (RBD) and the 30 first-order subnational jurisdictions located in Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico, and Peru that signed on to it between 2014 and 2018, committing to reduce deforestation 80% by 2020, conditional upon adequate financial support from the international community. We assess each study jurisdiction’s progress toward that commitment based on deforestation data, and examine some of the potential factors supporting or slowing progress, including the existence of commensurate targets within jurisdictions’ legal frameworks and the international financial support pledged to jurisdictions. We found that progress toward achieving the target was slow and likely unattainable in most jurisdictions outside of Brazil. Among the four jurisdictions likely to achieve the target under current deforestation trajectories, only Mato Grosso has a target within its legal framework that is more ambitious than the RBD target. We found that the international response to the RBD was sluggish and likely inadequate – with only one financial pledge made in direct response to the declaration and the majority of funding to support jurisdictional efforts coming from one source. We did not find a clear relationship between international finance pledged and progress toward the RBD deforestation target; however, more often, jurisdictions that received pledges earlier have made more progress. We explore what may explain individual jurisdictions’ performance with respect to the target, including specific jurisdictional circumstances, national context, and international support. We estimate that, if current deforestation trajectories continue, the RBD signatories in our study could contribute approximately 3.7% (0.65 GtCO2e) of the greenhouse gas emissions reduction needed to keep global warming at 1.5°C, compared with a potential 5.7% (0.98 GtCO2e) if they were to all meet the RBD target.
Highlights
Tropical deforestation accounts for 11 to 14% of global CO2 emissions (IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 2018), and has been a focus of proposed regional and global climate mitigation solutions for over a decade (Santilli et al, 2005; Kindermann et al, 2008; Griscom et al, 2017)
Conditional Finance We identified the amount of the total pre- and post-Rio Branco Declaration (RBD) finance that could be directly attributed to a jurisdiction being an RBD signatory, based on whether RBD signature is a stipulation of receiving the finance or if the funding source otherwise referenced the RBD
Projected Date of Fulfillment of RBD Target We estimated that only four jurisdictions are projected to achieve the 80% reduction in deforestation by 2020: Mato Grosso, Maranhão, Tocantins, and Papua (Figure 3)
Summary
Tropical deforestation accounts for 11 to 14% of global CO2 emissions (IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), 2018), and has been a focus of proposed regional and global climate mitigation solutions for over a decade (Santilli et al, 2005; Kindermann et al, 2008; Griscom et al, 2017). The proliferation of voluntary commitments by non-national governments and actors reflects a shift from more top-down, formal agreements negotiated among nation-states to a more bottom-up and multi-level and/or polycentric approach to solving complex environmental problems (Boyd, 2010; Bulkeley et al, 2014; Jordan et al, 2015) Nowhere is this truer than with respect to climate change mitigation and adaptation, including in regard to tropical deforestation and land use. We define forest-related finance as encompassing programs or activities with the specific goal of reducing deforestation or emissions from deforestation, and those supporting forest monitoring systems, sustainable production systems, maintenance of conservation areas, reforestation or afforestation projects, community or IP/LC forest management, rural land titling, prevention and monitoring of forest fires, and subnational contributions to national REDD+ or other forest-related strategies (Supplementary Text S4). When the original source listed only non-USD currency amounts, we converted the given values to USD using an historical currency conversion database (OANDA, 2020), using the average exchange rate over the year in which the finance was pledged or contracted since we could not always confirm the exact date (Supplementary Table S4)
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