MRV Team visit to Colombia and participates in Jurisdictional REDD+ workshop

MRV Team visit to Colombia and participates in Jurisdictional REDD+ workshop
The FCMC MRV team traveled to Bogota, Colombia from July 22 – 29, 2013 to attend meetings and work on two FCMC MRV activities that are in progress or being planned. Meetings were held with the Institute of Hydrology, Meteorology and Environmental Studies (IDEAM) Colombia and key consultants who will be working on the reference levels activity, which will support the current work by IDEAM and the Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development (MADS) to develop subnational reference emissions levels for Colombia.

Professor Armando Sarmiento, a senior economist at the Universidad Javeriana, will be working with IDEAM and Jonah Busch at Conservation International (CI) to apply the OSIRIS model for the reference level development. The MRV team held meetings with IDEAM to plan an OSIRIS training workshop for Professor Sarmiento and IDEAM to work with CI in Washington, D.C. in August, and to extend the reference level activity to address elements of the national reference level planning.

The FCMC team also advanced the planning of the community-based Measurement, Reporting and Verification (MRV) activity in Colombia with IDEAM, and held meetings with World Wildlife Fund (WWF)-Colombia and the USAID mission to discuss possibilities for holding community-level workshops to consult with communities in the Amazon and Pacific regions on MRV systems for REDD+, and potential roles, benefits and safeguards for communities. The community-based MRV activity will also feature a component on early-warning alert systems for deforestation/fire monitoring, which the regional autonomous Corporaciones have expressed a strong interest in.

Finally, the MRV team attended a workshop hosted by Fundacion Natura, Colombia and the Verified Carbon Standard (VCS) on jurisdictional REDD+ projects in Colombia. The workshop featured presentations by F. Natura and VCS senior representatives on jurisdictional REDD+ projects that are being developed or are in progress in Colombia. The MRV team met with several non-governmental organizations, private project developers and government agency representatives at the workshop to discuss FCMC’s work as part of USAID’s contributions to REDD+ readiness in Colombia.

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