The Oromia Forested Landscape Program’s goal is to reduce deforestation and net greenhouse gas emissions from land use in all forested areas in the Oromia Regional State. Addressing the drivers of deforestation and forest degradation in Ethiopia will require an integrated landscape perspective that addresses trade-offs and synergies among land uses that include forest, crop, livestock, water, and household energy objectives.
The ISFL program would be Oromia Regional State’s strategic programmatic umbrella and coordination platform for multi-sector, multi-partner intervention on all forested landscapes in Oromia. The 10-year program would contribute to a transformation in how forested landscapes are managed in Oromia to deliver multiple benefits such as poverty reduction and resilient livelihoods, climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation, and water provisioning. The Oromia Forested Landscape Program would foster equitable and sustainable low carbon development through a series of: (i) on-the-ground activities that address deforestation, reduce land-use based emissions and enhance forest carbon stocks; and (ii) state-wide and local enhancements to institutions, incentives, information, and safeguards management to upscale investment (enabling environment), including coordinating multiple REDD-relevant interventions across the regional state.
The program would have two components. An $18 million mobilization grant would finance activities over a 5-year period: (1) Local-level activities; and (2) State-level activities/ enabling. These funds would be channeled to Government of Ethiopia as a recipient executed grant. The second component would consist of Emission Reductions Payments for verified emissions reductions as they are delivered over a 10-year period (that overlap with the first component), which would be channeled through the ISFL.
At the same time, the project would monitor forest cover change throughout Oromia. The Program would monitor and account for positive and negative changes in forest cover and associated greenhouse gas emissions within the regional state boundaries of Oromia (i.e., the ‘accounting area of the Program’). As per the 2013 Ethiopia Mapping Agency map and the Ethiopia's forest definition, this includes 9 million hectares of forests, which represents 50 percent of the country's forest area.
The Oromia Forested Landscape Program is part of The BioCarbon Fund Initiative for Sustainable Forest Landscapes (ISFL) is a multilateral fund, supported by donor governments and managed by the World Bank. It promotes reducing greenhouse gas emissions from the land sector, from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries (REDD+).