An agreement at the U.N. climate talks in Mexico to move ahead with REDD+ is a boon for efforts to cut carbon emissions, slow the rate of deforestation, promote biodiversity and combat poverty.

Eba’a Atyi, a Cameroonian, has more than 25 years experience working in forestry, especially in tropical forest management planning, forest economics, forest certification and forestry institutions. He has a PhD in forest resources management and economics from the Wageningen University, the Netherlands. Prior to joining CIFOR, he worked for the European Commission-funded project African Forests (FORAF) on the development of an Observatory for the Forests of Central Africa (OFAC).

Mexican President Felipe Calderon, who has transformed his country into a leading voice on climate change, will join more than 1,800 forestry experts, activists, policymakers, global leaders, and climate change negotiators at Forest Day 4 to discuss the urgency of ensuring the survival of the world’s forests.

With hundreds of REDD+ pilot projects planned for the world’s tropical forests, the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) has published a guide on how to measure their welfare impacts on forest users.

Massive amounts of carbon are being released into the atmosphere as swathes of forests growing on peat swamps in Southeast Asia are being converted to palm oil plantations, new analysis has shown, prompting scientists to call for a special focus on them in the upcoming climate talks.

Significant progress toward a deal on REDD+ may be made at the upcoming U.N. Climate Change Conference in Mexico, but negotiators will first have to find common ground on a range of sticky details about how it may work.

A new study finds a lack of transparency and corruption are reducing the impact of an initiative in Cameroon that channels a portion of national timber levies to rural forest communities. The study highlights the challenges of using a climate change pact to do something similar in forested regions around the world.

More than 1,500 leading forestry experts, activists, policymakers, global leaders, and climate change negotiators will gather on the sidelines of UNFCCC COP-16 for the fourth annual Forest Day to discuss the urgency of ensuring the survival of the world’s forests, the biodiversity they embrace and the hundreds of millions of people who depend on them.

Meeting will bring together the world’s leading scientists and thinkers on forests and climate change to inform the global agenda, alongside December’s United Nations Climate Change Conference in Cancun, Mexico.

With governments across Latin America preparing to implement a new financial mechanism aimed at mitigating climate change by curbing carbon emissions from the destruction of tropical forests, experts gathering here today warned against a “one-size-fits-all” approach, calling instead for flexible, balanced solutions to the thorny dilemmas surrounding this new mechanism. Among the experts’ chief worries is that the wealthy and powerful could capture many of the benefits, largely at the expense of rural communities, including indigenous groups.