On January 28 and 29, 2013, the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) hosted a technical workshop called “Building REDD+ Reference Levels” at WWF’s U.S. headquarters in Washington, D.C. The objective of the workshop was to provide an informal opportunity for representatives from several REDD+ countries to share their experiences in the development of national and subnational forest reference levels and to learn from their collective knowledge at a time when guidance on reference levels is being developed at the FCPF Carbon Fund and elsewhere. Workshop participants included a range of stakeholders from national and state governments, civil society organizations, REDD+ multilateral funds, the private sector, and academia (see Annex I of the synthesis report for a full list of participants).

During the workshop, participants were invited to highlight major challenges and barriers that they faced in developing their forest reference levels, as well as to share lessons learned and outline technical capacity gaps in their countries (see Annex II for a detailed agenda of the workshop). This report summarizes the discussions and key findings of this workshop and highlights some possible pathways forward in light of these findings.

The Synthesis Report: WWF-FCPF Technical Workshop on REDD+ Reference Levels presents the key findings of the workshop and highlights some possible pathways forward in light of these findings. This is expected to be available at the end of July 2013.

For more information on this workshop and to view the presentations, visit: http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/footprint/forest_climate2/events/