Group 06
Evaluating the Underperformance of UN-Backed REDD+ Initiatives in Combating Deforestation in Brazil
Dear Group 6,
Thank you for your careful Research Kick-Off Report on REDD+ in Brazil. You have a strong motivation and a solid grasp of key environmental economics issues: externalities, public goods, property rights, and governance. The potential for success is excellent if you clearly organize the different channels of underperformance and tie each channel to both evidence and economic concepts.
You are working toward both the presentation and the final proposal. Focus on economic reasoning supported by existing literature and descriptive evidence.
Next Steps
Clarify your main channels of underperformance
Identify two or three core channels (e.g., leakage, weak land tenure and insecure property rights, governance and corruption, weak monitoring and enforcement, issues with additionality or permanence). State them precisely in your framing.Link each channel to concrete evidence
For each channel, find at least one specific example or piece of evidence from secondary sources (reports, case studies, or empirical papers). Brief case descriptions will be more powerful than generic statements.Tie channels to core economic concepts
Systematically connect your channels of underperformance to:- Externalities & public goods (e.g., forest carbon as a global public good)
- Property rights & land tenure
- Principal–agent problems and incentive compatibility between funders, governments, and local actors.
- Externalities & public goods (e.g., forest carbon as a global public good)
Clarify behavior and incentives “on the ground”
Organize your discussion around how households, firms, and local governments respond to current REDD+ incentives, and why those responses may lead to leakage, non-additionality, or weak enforcement.Develop clear policy implications
Propose realistic reforms to REDD+ and related forest-protection programs:- How should payments, contracts, monitoring, and enforcement be redesigned?
- How can we better align incentives across international funders, Brazil’s federal and state governments, and local communities?
- How should payments, contracts, monitoring, and enforcement be redesigned?
Incorporate simple descriptive evidence or visualizations (optional but encouraged)
It would be helpful to include one or two simple tables or figures in your presentation slides drawn from existing sources (e.g., time trends in deforestation, payment flows, or REDD+ project performance). This can help motivate your research question and show the scale of the problem.
Suggested References to Incorporate
Please consider building your conceptual and narrative framework around the following references (you do not need to read every detail, but try to extract key insights):
- “Overstated carbon emission reductions from voluntary REDD+ projects in the Brazilian Amazon” (PNAS, 2020)
- Evidence on additionality, baseline setting, and over-crediting in Brazil’s voluntary REDD+ projects.
- “REDD+ as Result-based Aid: General Lessons and Bilateral Agreements of Norway” (Review of Development Economics, 2016)
- Useful for framing REDD+ as result-based aid, principal–agent relationships, and the design of bilateral agreements (e.g., Norway–Brazil).
- “State of Finance for Forests (SFF) report: Unlock. Unleash. Realizing forest potential requires tripling investments in forests by 2030”(UN-REDD Programme, 2025)
- Helpful for discussing climate finance, the scale of investment needed, and where REDD+ fits within broader forest and climate finance strategies.
From these references, you might extract one or two key charts or summary statistics (e.g., trends in forest finance, deforestation rates, or estimated over-crediting) to include in your presentation slides as motivation.
Questions to Think About as You Refine Your Final Proposal
You do not need to answer all of these, but they may help you refine your narrative and policy recommendations:
a. Principal–agent problems and incentives
- Where do you see principal–agent problems in REDD+ (for example, between international funders, national governments, subnational authorities, local communities, and individual landowners)?
- How do misaligned incentives at each of these levels help explain why REDD+ underperforms, even when there is substantial funding?
b. Structural vs. individual drivers of deforestation
- To what extent are deforestation decisions driven by individual landowners’ choices versus broader structural drivers such as commodity prices (beef, soy), land-tenure institutions, credit markets, and weak enforcement?
- How does this distinction affect how you think about responsibility, and which policies are likely to be most effective?
c. Program and contract design
- If you could change one major feature of REDD+ (monitoring technology, contract length, payment structure, local participation, or enforcement mechanisms), what would it be, and why?
- How would you connect that change to your economic concepts (e.g., improving incentive compatibility, clarifying property rights, or reducing information asymmetries)?
d. International climate finance and scaling up
- What do the Norway agreements and the State of Finance for Forests report suggest about the scale and structure of funding needed for REDD+ to succeed in Brazil?
- Are current REDD+ designs more like small project-based fixes, or can they be scaled into a credible national or jurisdictional-level instrument for reducing deforestation?
Best,
Byeong-Hak