This issue of ETFRN News contains more than 20 wide-ranging articles on forests and climate change. The topics covered include: (1) the international policies on tropical forests under the UNFCCC and the Kyoto Protocol; (2) country-level REDD experiences; (3) different forest management practices; (4) various climate change adaptation strategies for forest sector; (5) landscape restoration practices and (6) various forest carbon business approaches.

Forests play an important role in both adaptation and mitigation, as they provide local ecosystem services relevant for adaptation as well as the global ecosystem service of carbon sequestration, relevant for mitigation. Consequently, just as there are synergies and trade-offs between global and local ecosystem services, there are synergies and trade-offs between mitigation and adaptation: mitigation projects can facilitate or hinder local people"s efforts to adapt to climate change, and adaptation projects can affect ecosystems and their potential to sequester carbon.

This publication reports on WWF’s forest and climate work between 2010 and 2013 which sought to develop models for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) that secure scalable forest ecosystem management while engaging those communities that live in and depend on forests in way improve their livelihoods. The report concludes that although valuable, REDD+ is not an end in itself but one tool to conserve biodiversity, reduce carbon emissions and combat climate change and although critical cannot exist in isolation.

Climate change presents the world with a daunting problem. Responding to this problem will require pioneering efforts in science, politics, pollution control, forest land management and law. This document examines the development of international law on climate change and discusses what issues national and subnational legislative bodies may have to consider regarding climate change mitigation and forests.The paper outlines provisions relevant to forests in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC) and the Kyoto Protocol.