Global Safeguards Advisor
Jurisdictional REDD+ has reached the point where results are being verified and credited. In June 2026 Costa Rica became the first country to have REDD+ removals verified under The REDD+ Environmental Excellence Standard (TREES) of the Architecture for REDD+ Transactions (ART) programme, and a growing number of national and subnational governments are preparing programmes under TREES 3.0 and Verra's Jurisdictional and Nested REDD+ (JNR) framework. As results-based revenue becomes a practical prospect, the question of who should receive it, and on what grounds, moves from principle to practice.
The new Learning Journal on Fair and Equitable Benefit Sharing from the United Nations Programme on Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (UN-REDD), sets out to help the government practitioners who have to answer that question. It draws on international law and the carbon standards, and on the experience of jurisdictions including Costa Rica, Ghana and the Brazilian state of Acre. Benefit sharing arrangements take different forms in different places, depending on who holds rights, what national law allows and what those concerned agree. The Journal uses “arrangement” for the full set of decisions on who benefits, how much and through what channels, whether set out in a benefit sharing plan, in law or in an agreement between the parties.
Requirements have become more detailed
Benefit sharing requirements have become steadily more detailed, both in the carbon standards and in the guidance of results-based finance programmes. The World Bank's Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) published dedicated benefit sharing guidance for its Emission Reduction Programs in 2019 and has revised it twice since, most recently in November 2024. TREES 3.0 expanded its benefit sharing requirements in 2026. Participants, the national or subnational governments that lead jurisdictional programmes, must now describe, in each monitoring report, the stakeholder groups eligible for benefits and the principles and criteria for allocating them, and show that the process used to agree the arrangement is consistent with the TREES safeguards. JNR requires a benefit sharing system that considers stakeholders' rights alongside their contribution to the results.
The Journal organizes its guidance around four principles (rights-based; participatory and inclusive; clear allocation criteria; transparent and accountable) and six elements every arrangement has to resolve, from the basis of a claim to benefits through to grievance redress.
Rights and contribution are different claims
One of the Journal's most practical points concerns the grounds on which people claim a share. A claim can rest on rights, to land, resources or the emission reductions themselves, or on contribution, meaning the work that produced the result. A rights-holder is owed a share whether or not they take part in programme activities; those whose actions reduced emissions are paid for those actions.
The distinction has real consequences. Certification measures the reduction in emissions against a baseline. Communities that have protected their forests for generations may add little to the measured result, and allocation based purely on performance can exclude them. An arrangement can therefore combine a share that recognizes rights with a share that reflects contribution. Acre, for example, rewards both the reduction in emissions and the forest that is still standing. The weighting between the two should be explicit and agreed with both rights-holders and contributors.
Few countries' laws specify who holds rights to emission reductions, and waiting for them to do so can stall benefit sharing indefinitely. Where those rights can be established under existing law, new legislation may be unnecessary. Where land and resource claims are contested, decisions on who benefits can heighten tension between claimants and be drawn into later disputes over tenure. An interim arrangement should protect the position of those whose rights have yet to be recognized, leaving their claims to be resolved as the legal framework develops, and may need to clarify how receiving benefits relates to those claims.
Agreement is reached through dialogue
International law refers to fair and equitable benefit sharing. Drawing on the work of Elisa Morgera, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights in the context of climate change, the Journal treats it as a dialogue aimed at a shared understanding of what the benefits are and how they should be divided, with attention to the power imbalances between the parties.
That changes what consultation is for. Rather than seeking stakeholders' approval of a plan the programme has already drafted, consultation is where the plan's substance is decided: who is eligible, what the benefits are, how they are divided and how they are delivered. For Indigenous Peoples, participation runs through their own representative institutions, and where benefits derive from their lands, territories or resources, decisions on the arrangement may require their free, prior and informed consent.
Practical arrangements are as important as method. Meetings need to be held at times and places everyone concerned can reach, and those taking part may need independent legal and technical advice to negotiate on equal terms. These processes are expensive and come before any results-based payment, so they need upfront funding, typically from government budgets or readiness finance, planned from the outset. Eligibility and access are also distinct: someone can qualify for a benefit and still be unable to receive it, for instance where payments go to an account held in another household member's name.
What counts as a benefit
Plans often count two things as benefits that the Journal argues should be kept separate, because counting them inflates the share that appears to reach communities.
The first is compensation. Where a programme imposes restrictions on access to land or resources, compensation and support to restore livelihoods are owed, and that is an obligation distinct from benefit sharing. Where a community chooses to restrict access through its own decision-making, payments that offset the cost can legitimately form part of the arrangement. The difference lies in who made the decision.
The second is the programme's operational costs. Monitoring, verification, safeguards compliance and consultation are costs of implementation. Results-based revenue can fund them, and many plans do, with these costs accounted for separately from benefits. A plan should define these costs and state the proportion of payments they take.
A related point is that a percentage needs to say what it is a percentage of. Buffer contributions and transfer costs reduce what is available, and some fees only become known when payments are made. Agreeing at the outset whether shares apply to gross or net revenue, which deductions apply and who bears costs that arise later keeps what is delivered close to what was agreed.
Delivering and accounting for benefits
Results-based revenue arrives years after a programme begins, and the amount is rarely predictable. The Journal treats this as a reason to be explicit from the outset about what revenue is expected and when, and about what will reach people in the meantime, such as capacity support for community institutions or other non-monetary benefits funded before results-based payments arrive, rather than a reason to delay engagement.
To deliver benefits, the Journal recommends building on channels and institutions that already exist. Costa Rica built on a national payment for ecosystem services programme that the National Forestry Financing Fund (FONAFIFO) has run since 1997, more than a decade before REDD+ existed. Each body in the delivery chain needs a legal mandate and the capacity to receive, hold, disburse and account for funds, and community-level bodies most often lack the legal personality to hold them. Experience from Indigenous Peoples-led funds shows that opening accounts and setting up fiduciary systems takes much longer than expected. Operating costs averaging around a quarter of budgets are the infrastructure that makes community-managed funding work and need to be budgeted for accordingly.
Accountability depends on a record that can be checked. Beneficiaries should be told, in a form and language they understand, what the programme received, what was deducted and what reached each group. A grievance mechanism also needs to cover benefit sharing complaints expressly: exclusion from the list of beneficiaries, late or missing payments, disputes over the criteria, and capture by more powerful actors.
From questions to agreement
The Journal sets out the questions every arrangement has to answer, with a framework for recording the answers in a benefit sharing agreement. Those party to an arrangement are the first to judge whether it is fair and equitable, and validation and verification, along with the arrangement's record of grievances and outcomes, show over time whether that judgement holds.
As more jurisdictions move from readiness to results, how they share benefits will shape whether jurisdictional REDD+ keeps the support of the people whose forests it depends on.
The UN-REDD Learning Journal on Fair and Equitable Benefit Sharing is also available through the REDD+ Academy. It should be read alongside the UN-REDD Learning Journal on Social Inclusion and Gender.