Assessing the relevance of countries and their capacities for reporting forests under UNFCCC

The international community has committed itself to adopt a global climate agreement in Paris in 2015, which shall enter into force in 2020. Common guidelines and commitments have to be developed for two distinctive groups of countries. On the one hand, there are developed countries with comprehensive emission reporting guidelines and - depending on national ambitions - emission reduction commitments, the so called Annex I countries. On the other hand, there is the group of Non-Annex I countries. This group consists of emerging economies and least developed countries, with different economic and technical capacities regarding emission reporting and accounting. At the same time, the group of Non-Annex I countries significantly contributes to global emissions, inter alia with deforestation and non-sustainable forest management. In the light of ongoing negotiations, we dissolve the given distinction between Annex I and Non- Annex I countries and ask, which countries are actually relevant for an effective climate agreement for the forest sector. To assess the countries' relevance, we assign public available data sets to a set of criteria and indicators and combine these C&I with flexible weighting. In a second step we use the same method but different C&I, to assess the countries' capacities regarding a common emission reporting for the forest sector. The results show that climate relevant countries are distributed all over the world and cannot be narrowed down to one group or continent. Further, we identified countries which might not be climate relevant on the global scale, but which are highly engaged under climate negotiations because of national circumstances. The capacity assessment shows that some developing countries, including the emerging economies, should have the capacities to report reliably on forest related emissions from 2020 onwards. However, the majority of developing countries will rely on capacity building programs financed by the international community. With increasing capacities, more and more countries will be able to reduce emissions and demand for result-based payments. Thus, a common and effective climate agreement post 2020 depends on reliable financial commitments.