Review Essay

• Dehm, Julia 1

Abstract

The 2015 Paris Agreement on Climate Change confirmed that the controversial reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation scheme, known as REDD+, will play a central role in the post-2020 climate regime. This review essay considers a recent Handbook dedicated to exploring the relationship between REDD+ and different areas of international law, which comprehensively brings together expertise on many diverse areas of international legal practice, including trade and investment, contractual and fiduciary risk as well as human rights considerations. While this valuable collection will surely become an indispensable ‘toolbox’ for practitioners and academics working on questions pertaining to REDD+, this review highlights some of the more complex methodological and political questions REDD+ raises and their implications for how REDD+ is characterized and its effects understood. It foregrounds the critiques by grassroots indigenous and climate justice activists, some of whom have argued that REDD+ represents a form of ‘green grabbing’ or ‘COonialism’. Additionally, it suggests that further investigation is needed into how REDD+ establishes, stabilizes and consolidates new forms of power relations and modes of authority as well greater consideration of the distributional consequences of carbon markets and their allocations of differentiated privileges, obligations and responsibilities.

• 1Lecturer, La Trobe Law School, Melbourne, Australia