Senior forestry officials from Indonesia, Viet Nam, and Nepal, private-sector partners and climate finance experts gathered in Seoul this week to chart the next steps for scaling up high-integrity forest carbon transactions across the Asia-Pacific.
The roundtable meeting, held at the Global Green Growth Institute (GGGI) as part of Global Green Growth Week, was co-organized by UN-REDD to help countries move from REDD+ readiness for results-based finance and Article 6 implementation under the Paris Agreement.
“Countries in the Asia Pacific are demonstrating that protecting forests and building credible carbon markets are two sides of the same coin,” said Gabriel Labbate, Head of UNEP’s Climate Mitigation Unit and Global Team Leader of UN-REDD. “They are moving from readiness to results - building systems that not only store carbon, but also sustain livelihoods, restore ecosystems, and build trust in the markets that finance them.”
Across Indonesia, Viet Nam and Nepal, more than 230 million tonnes of CO₂ equivalent (tCO₂e) in potential mitigation results are being readied for verification or issuance - signaling a major pipeline of forest-based climate outcomes linked to community resilience and green investment.
On the occasion, discussion was focused on practical, country-led steps to accelerate verified issuance, clarify national positions ahead of COP 30, and explored how the proposed Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) - an endowment-style, non-offset mechanism offering per-hectare payments for standing forests - could support and complement domestic efforts to attract long-term, high-integrity investment into forest landscapes.
