Project News

The previous issue reported that JICA, as an Accredited Entity of GCF, will support the Government of Lao PDR (GoL) in accessing REDD+ Results-Based Payment. As a first step, JICA submitted a Concept Note to the GCF Secretariat on 13 September. Since then, the GoL and JICA have been working on the preparation of the Funding Proposal (FP) with the aim of submitting it in April 2021 and review and approval by the 30th Board Meeting around November 2021. The FP also needs to include a summary of the project using the REDD+ Results-Based Payment funds (tentative name: GCF/JICA Project), which is an important item for review by GCF.

For this reason, the DOF established a Task Force (TF) consisting of representatives of the relevant divisions, and selected four landscapes as candidate project sites with F-REDD based on forest change status and analysis of other large-scale forest conservation projects. The landscapes are combined areas of adjacent conservation and protection forests in five provinces in southern Laos. In order to obtain the agreement to conduct field surveys on the four landscapes as candidate sites, a meeting was held in the city of Pakse in southern Laos on 28 September with representatives of the five provinces, the Director General of the DOF, the survey team, and F-REDD members.

At the meeting, the outline of REDD+ and Results-Based Payment, as well as the process of selecting candidate sites, were explained. Agreement was obtained to conduct a survey of the candidate sites. After the meeting, the first round of the survey was conducted over one week. Going forward, F-REDD will conduct surveys more focused on purposes and target areas and, through consultations with the TF, finalize the GCF/JICA Project proposal, which will be outlined in the FP.