National REDD+ Investment Framework and Action Plan (NRIFAP 2017).

This National REDD+ Investment Framework and Action Plan (NRIFAP) is a cross-sectoral five year (2018-2022) USD 99 million investment framework financed from both domestic and international sources. The vision for REDD+ has been developed as: "Forests and beyond; sustaining life and livelihoods in a greener Sri Lanka”. Sri Lanka will harness the transformational potential of REDD+ to ensure improved land management practices that protect, maintain and enhance ecological functions and social benefits, while sustaining current economic growth. This Vision forms part of the national approach to improving the overall effectiveness of the country’s forest and land management regimes. A number of key cross cutting goals to be achieved through REDD+ include: climate change mitigation; sustainable land management; restoration and maintenance of ecosystem services; sustaining current economic growth; and minimize natural disaster risks. To address the identified drivers of forest cover change, the NRIFAP identified 13 Policies and Measures (PAMs), which have been categorized under three priority policy areas: (i) Forest, Wildlife and Watershed, (ii) Land Use Planning and (iii) Other Forested Lands.
According to the NRIFAP, implementation of the NRIFAP will deliver a number of noncarbon benefits. These non-carbon benefits will contribute to good environmental governance, rural economic development, social justice and ecosystem services restoration and enhancement, as well as to climate change adaptation. The following indicators will be used to monitor non-carbon benefits during the implementation of the NRIFAP: Increased revenue stream from forest conservation and protection and sustainable forest management; Reduced human-wildlife conflicts; Increased employment opportunities/income generation opportunities; Reduced women’s labour hours; Increased timber and fuel wood supply; Increased water supply/soil conservation benefits through improved forest management; Reduced natural disaster risks (fire, landslide, etc.); Increased food and nutrition security; and Increased export value of forest products.
The NRIFAP promotes to make forestry more sustainable and productive through taking the PAMs such as: (a) Improve forest law enforcement and monitoring; (b) Scale-up of forest boundary survey, demarcation and declaration; (c) Restore degraded forests and wildlife ecosystems; (d) Strengthen sustainable forest management (natural forests); (e) Strengthen sustainable management of forest plantations; (f) Strengthen protection of watersheds; (g )Improve forest law enforcement and monitoring; (h) Support inclusion of Strategic Environmental Assessment under Land Use Planning (LUP); (h) Improve land productivity and rehabilitation practices; (h) Improve the tree cover of non-forested lands (home gardens, urban centre, public lands and settlements so as to create an enabling condition for forest protection by increasing supply of timber and fuelwood in order to reduce pressure on natural forests; (i) Strengthen protection of other non-state forested lands; etc. PAMs in land use planning focus on broader aspects of land management concerning forests, including land use planning to fully adopt strategic and sustainable land management practices with the national forest cover expansion target in mind. The majority of the PAMs under this policy area are considered enabling activities, which support the implementation of other PAMs which are more directly aiming at generating emissions reductions or/and removals.
The NRIFAP supports to enable more inclusive and efficient forestry systems by taking PAMs such as: Develop agroforestry models for addressing forest degradation so as to create an enabling condition for making the existing agro-forestry schemes financially more viable for the schemes’ participants in order to reduce pressure on natural forests; Strengthen local supply chain for fuelwood demand; etc.