At present Mexico has a baseline (REL) for deforestation but not for degradation or for forest enhancements; so cannot claim performance-related rewards for these elements of REDD+

Mexico has proposed a national Reference Emission Level (REL) to the UNFCCC and has developed an Initiative for Reduced Emissions, with finance from FCPF.  However the REL includes only emissions from deforestation and forest fires.  This is mainly because there is insufficient historical data on changing carbon stocks within forests to estimate trends in degradation and forest enhancement.  On a parallel track, there is an opening for activities that promote carbon removals through forest enhancement. These can be developed by forest owners, including communities, as individual projects, and could be financed through sale of credits in national and international voluntary carbon markets, based on local monitoring of increasing stocks as a result of local management interventions.

Reduced degradation however remains out of the picture in terms of finance for the time being, even though it is possibly the greatest contributor to forest emissions. The difficulty is primarily related to lack of historical data, which is a problem worldwide, and the challenge is how to develop robust degradation baselines either at the local or the national level. 

This message is the fourth of 8 key messages from the WOTROMEX programme.  The case study area is the Ayuquila Basin in western Jalisco, which is a REDD+ Early Action Area under the Mexican national strategy for REDD+. WOTROMEX is supported by the Netherlands Science for Global Development Programme (NWO-WOTRO) and has been carried out by CIGA-UNAM together with the University of Twente, the Netherlands