| October 18th, 2017 | NBFN News

Organised by the Norwegian Blue Forest Network and Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI)
Oslo, October 16-17

The goals of the workshop were to

• Identify key challenges and potential solutions for integrating mangroves into REDD+ strategies
• Identify focal themes and points of engagement with the Oslo REDD Exchange in 2018

Workshop participants identified several key categories of challenges for integrating mangroves into REDD+, including social barriers (e.g. lack of analytical capabilities within specific regions); policy barriers (e.g. unclear tenure in mangrove areas and jurisdictional controls); market-based barriers (e.g. access to carbon markets, how to structure benefit sharing schemes); and monitoring barriers (e.g. complexity with soil depth measurements). Breakout groups then detailed aspects of challenges within each category, focusing on social, policy, market-based, and monitoring issues. Solutions to some of these barriers were also suggested. From these discussions, two key themes emerged: 1) Several challenges are shared with tropical terrestrial forests, but mangroves also present unique challenges. These challenges can be overcome as the importance of the values outweigh the existing barriers. 2) Social and cultural issues are embedded in many of the challenges to integrating mangroves into REDD+, although there are identified interventions and potential solutions that can be used to overcome these.