Authors: Stephen Leonard, Bruno Locatelli, Daniel Murdiyarso, Christopher Martius, Margaretha Quina and Himlal Baral

Key messages

• Both mitigation and adaptation are of critical importance to the land sector, including forests and people depending on forests.
• Mitigation and adaptation are two sides of the same coin’, but have often been treated separately, which reduces efficiency and effectiveness of policies and measures.
• Links between adaptation and mitigation are being made in the 2015 Paris Agreement, in the Warsaw REDD+ frameworks and by the Green Climate Fund.
• Research shows that there are many benefits to considering adaptation and mitigation jointly, for example in REDD+, and that an increasing number of synergistic projects are being implemented on the ground.
• Capacities to establish programs and projects that integrate adaptation and mitigation remain a challenge
• Policymakers can identify opportunities for harnessing the synergies between adaptation and mitigation and can also analyse trade-offs and put in place safeguards to reduce or avoid them
• Incentivizing the necessary research to further elucidate links and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation will be important.

Published by Center for International Forestry Research 2016

CIFOR Info brief 137

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