Norway funding agency sees future for forest project

President Bharrat Jagdeo (left) and Norwegian Minister of International Development and the Environment, Erik Solheim, shake hands after the completion of the signing of the Memorandum of Understanding between Guyana and Norway in November 2009 here. (GINA photo)

More should be done for the timely disbursement of funds to Guyana, the Norwegian government agency through which monies are channelled to pay Guyana for protecting its forests, has said even as it urged the de-politicisation of Guyana’s Low Carbon Development Strategy (LCDS).

“One of the reasons that deforestation rates have increased in Guyana is that very little has been implemented to mitigate the impacts of mining, which is the main driver of deforestation.

In turn, one of the reasons very little has been done is because of the delay in disbursing funds from the Guyana REDD+ Investment Fund (GRIF), and so the existing financial set-up is implicated in the limited success in achieving NICFI’s climate objectives,” the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (NORAD) said in a report released on Monday.

NORAD is a directorate under the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and since 2010, it has been monitoring Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI) via which