Where benefits and costs accrue at different scales, financial intermediaries are needed to facilitate relations between global-scale buyers and local-scale providers of carbon sequestration and storage. These intermediaries can help to collect and distribute payments and to promote the scheme to potential beneficiaries. The benefits distributed should compensate for the transaction, opportunity and implementation costs incurred by stakeholders for providing ecosystem services. Therefore, calculating the costs and understanding who incurs them are essential for benefit sharing. Targeting benefits according to a set of criteria that match the objectives of the specific mechanism increases the mechanism’s efficiency. As the level of performance-based payments may not be able to compete with the opportunity costs of highly profitable land uses, performance-related benefit-sharing mechanisms should be focused on areas with moderate opportunity costs. Benefits should be divided into upfront payments to cover startup costs and to give an initial incentive for participation, and payments upon delivery of ecosystem services to ensure adherence to conditionality.

Benefit sharing (BS) approaches in community forestry (CF) are differentiated into: rights allocation-based, input-based and performance-based, from initiation to implementation and each approach has specific and complementary roles in ensuring effectiveness, efficiency and equity of benefit sharing mechanisms (BSMs).

The term "climate justice" began to gain traction in the late 1990s following a wide range of activities by social and environmental justice movements that emerged in response to the operations of the fossil fuel industry and, later, to what their members saw as the failed global climate governance model that became so transparent at COP15 in Copenhagen. The term continues to gain momentum in discussions around sustainable development, climate change, mitigation and adaptation, and has been slowly making its way into the world of international and national policy. However, the connections between these remain unestablished. Addressing the need for a comprehensive and integrated reference compendium, The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice provides students, academics and professionals with a valuable insight into this fast-growing field. Drawing together a multidisciplinary range of authors from the Global North and South, this Handbook addresses some of the most salient topics in current climate justice research, including just transition, urban climate justice and public engagement, in addition to the field’s more traditional focus on gender, international governance and climate ethics. With an emphasis on facilitating learning based on cutting-edge specialised climate justice research and application, each chapter draws from the most recent sources, real-world best practices and tutored reflections on the strategic dimensions of climate justice and its related disciplines. The Routledge Handbook of Climate Justice will be essential reading for students and scholars, as well as being a vital reference tool for those practically engaged in the field.

Legal frameworks to 'reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation' (REDD+) are analysed to focus on protections and benefits for indigenous peoples and forest communities.

Key messages Despite the promising benefits that reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, and foster conservation, sustainable management of forests, and enhancement of forest carbon stocks (REDD+) offers through incentives to conserve forests and/or change behavior, it also risks excluding women, exacerbating gender inequalities and restricting women's access to decision-making and benefit-distribution processes.Efforts to mainstream gender in REDD+ in Indonesia are underway. But these remain scattered, fragmented and concentrated at the national level. The Ministry of Environment and Forestry (MoEF) with support from the Ministry of Women's Empowerment and Child Protection (MWECP) have a pivotal role to play in providing a clear and accessible platform for streamlining these initiatives, and building on synergies with ongoing efforts in other sectors.Lessons from CIFOR's assessment of existing efforts to mainstream gender in REDD+ and review of broader research on gender and forests, point to the importance of focusing on both national and subnational levels. A balance must be made between promoting gender equality at all levels whilst designing and implementing measures that are flexible and reflect local-level realities.Recommendations for promoting gender equality in REDD+ include: mainstreaming gender across REDD+ agencies; fostering gender equitable participation in free prior and informed consent; and developing gender-inclusive action plans that are evidence based and developed in consultation with key stakeholders.

Experiences from incentive-based forest management are examined for their effects on the livelihoods of local communities. In the second section, country case studies provide a snapshot of REDD developments to date and identify design features for REDD that would support benefits for forest communities.