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ClientEarth’s ‘Building legal foundations for sustainable forests and livelihoods’ five-year project (2021-2025) seeks to combat deforestation, focussing both on supply-side forest governance reform and demand-side forest commodity supply chain reform. Our first objective is to improve and promote community forestry as a tool to enhance forest management and governance, reduce deforestation, conserve biodiversity and generate sustainable development, focussing on Liberia, Republic of Congo and Gabon. Our second objective is to promote and shape import commodity regulations focusing on two of the largest importing markets, the EU and China. The programme is funded by the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (Norad) under its Norad International Climate and Forests Initiative (NICFI). The Midterm evaluation of the Norad programme took place from August 2023 to February 2024. An external consultant assessed our progress and the efficacy of our team’s work in the first half of the grant period towards achieving the outcomes and goals set out in our proposal.
The review found that the project is well on track to achieve its outcomes and the likelihood of the project’s gains continuing beyond the initial implementation period is high, given the significant legal framework advancements, local ownership through capacity building, and robust outreach and partnerships. A number of recommendations are also suggested to improve the sustainability and impact of the project.
ClientEarth's response to the recommendations can be found here