 I work for the EU Red Facility, which is an EU-funded program supporting land use reform and Red Plus processes in a few countries with a specific focus in the Congo Basin, which will also be what I will be talking to you about today. So this is more sort of a feedback of experience of our work there. We're not a research institution where we're a technical support institution and facilitator in those countries. I'll just give you a bit of a context of some of the general features of Benefit Sharing Arrangements in the Congo Basin, and then I'll give you some more detailed example specific to two countries that that we work in. That's the Democratic Republic of the Congo, DRC, and the Republic of Congo. So two neighboring countries, which are sharing quite a lot of challenges in that respect, and from that I'll try to draw some early lessons. Some elements of context, I think to start with, it's important to say that Benefit Sharing is not a new topic in those countries. There's already quite a lot of experiences in different sectors, forest sector, in conservation, in mining, oil and gas, etc. But without doubt, the forest sector is a sector where there's been much more experience as regards Benefit Sharing Arrangements, and that's also why it's been most documented. One general feature of the Benefit Sharing Arrangements that we've been looking at is that they're usually seen as compensation mechanism rather than payments for any type of performance or results. So they're seen as compensation for the limitation to the access to natural resources of different groups of stakeholders, but generally local communities. And in that sense, the benefits that are being shared do not at all reflect the actual costs that are incurring to the different stakeholders, but rather that can be seen as a form of taxation, maybe, of some of the stakeholders that get the privileged access to national resources. And sometimes they're also framed by certain market standards or CSR objectives, but there's a huge range of different incentives, really, for those who are sharing benefits. In the two countries that we work in, there are some legal provisions that are framing the sharing of those benefits, but they're not always comprehensive, and more importantly than the actual implementation provisions are very often missing. There's been a renewed attention lately on Benefit Sharing in the context of, well, the recent Red Plus development and the move towards the investment phase of Red Plus. Throughout the development of national Red Plus strategies, but also emission reduction programs. And the two countries I'm talking about, DRC and Republic of Congo, are both developing a jurisdictional emission reduction program at the moment. On the general international framework, there's very limited information coming from either the UNFCC, or the UNRED, or the FIP, or even the general FCPF provisions. And Benefit Sharing is not a very strong component of voluntary standards, either apart from some exceptions. And it is really the methodological framework of the FCPF Carbon Fund. That is serving as the guidance for those countries and for those mechanisms to be designed at the moment. There's two important provisions within the methodological framework, which dates from December 2013. So it's also quite recent provisions. One is on the necessity to have a benefit sharing plan and design benefit sharing arrangements, in a transparent and participative way, and also in a way that acknowledges the existing regulatory framework. And the second provision puts the emphasis on the inclusion and the monitoring of non-carbon benefits within the schemes. One common bottleneck that we encounter when we discuss these issues in the Congo Basin, and I'm sure that bottleneck is shared with many other countries, is the issue of carbon rights. And there is something very important that we're trying to, a message very important that we're trying to pass along, is that we need to decouple the red plus issue from tenure issue in that sense. If we stay stuck thinking that we need a framework and we need a red plus law, looking at allocating carbon rights, will move very, very, very slowly, because we're not there in terms of policy development in those countries. So the idea is really rather to looking at who owns the carbon, is who actually contributes to the carbon sequestration and to the emission reductions. And as was very nicely explained by Ashwin earlier, in the absence of that legal framework, there's been generally speaking only ad hoc arrangements that have been discussed and decided between stakeholders in the form of contracts. So that can potentially be present quite an important equity risk, because these arrangements greatly differ and are not framed at the moment by any general guidelines or safeguards at national level. In the Congo Basin, there's mainly two options that are currently being discussed as regards these issue of carbon rights. One is looking at carbon as a natural resource, and natural resources in the Congo Basin are owned by the state government. So the carbon reductions would be the property of the government and of the state. Another option is to see the emission reductions as environmental services, for which those specific stakeholders who have invested would be earning the rights. So these options are still at the moment discussed and debated in the countries we work in. Another key issue is, okay, what is it actually that we're sharing? I'm not going to go back to the definition of benefits because it's been very nicely covered earlier, but I think we need to keep in mind that there are many costs that need to be covered. There's the cost of compensation of the opportunity of the stakeholders that are changing their land uses. You have all the costs that are linked to the actual program or project implementation, and these costs are not negligible. They're really important. The transaction costs, the implementation costs, the MRV, the potential certification costs, and also the costs of all these implementing and enabling activities that support the general credibility of those projects. You also have to pay back your investors, and when all that is done, what's left? Well, there could be a bit of carbon rent left and that could be further distributed, but that's only really the case if a certain amount of conditions are met and which are currently an issue. So the conditions are obviously that these costs are as low as possible, but also that you get a good emission reduction objectives and a decent carbon price to cover all this. So in DRC, there's been discussion with regard to the development of a jurisdictional program in the region of Main-Dombe. So Main-Dombe covers about 5% of the countries and 12.3 million hectares of forests. And this project, this program is currently in the pipeline of the FCPF carbon fund. It's quite a complex project because it involves more than 20 partners, and there's already existing REDPLUS projects that need to be docked in this jurisdictional program. And one key feature as well is the stratification of objectives. Because this area is so complex and there are different land uses and different types of forests, there are specific objectives that are being spelled out for these different land uses and different reference levels will be set according to these land uses, and this has strong implications for the distribution of benefits. In the ERPIN, so the project idea note of that program, there's already been a number of principles that have been agreed on the benefit sharing. These are quite general principles on transparency, performance-based payments on the stratification, as I mentioned. But one very important is that they need to take account of previous contractual arrangements and need to be flexible enough for new contractual arrangements to be decided at sub-national level. And there's also provision for exacted payments. So what are the critical issues in the design of this program at the moment? Well, one of it is referring to that scheme I described earlier. There is a strong need to assess the costs and the benefits for each of the stakeholders of this program to ensure that the costs are being met before the revenues that would potentially come from the carbon fund or other sources be distributed. And this has strong implications in case, for example, of underperformance of the program. If you don't meet your objectives, well, how do you distribute the costs? Whose costs do you cover first? Do you privilege local communities? Do you privilege your investor? Do you privilege the state? These are very strong equity implications in those questions. As this is a jurisdictional program and not just a project-based initiative, there's a number of considerations also that need to be given to all the enabling conditions for it to perform. And this has a lot to do with potential support for the state to actually implement its policies and reinforce its forest control, et cetera. So how do you balance between rewarding your individual activities and performance with actually financing those enabling activities? And as I mentioned, there are already some Red Plus projects in the field which are generating credits and which have contractual arrangements existing with the state. And these need to be accounted for and integrated within the program. So that's quite complicated. Another way of looking at beneficiary, another issue is linked to how you channel those benefits to the communities. And in the Republic of Congo, we're currently doing some work to look at local development funds and how those funds could potentially play a role in Red Plus development. So the Republic of Congo has quite an interesting experience in having set up local organizations and local mechanisms to share benefits and most importantly in the forest sector. As in the DRC actually, the concessionaires are tied by some social implications and they have to dedicate part of their being taxed basically on their production to allocate money to local development funds which are then financing micro projects at the community level. So these funds are known to be quite participative and quite interesting also in their institutional arrangements. But there's quite a lot of difference between and in balance within the country and within the way they are being implemented. There's a big opportunity in this existing experience because they offer really a very interesting model for beneficiary and they're owned by the local people so that's very important. But some of the challenges that are implicated with these mechanisms is that the transaction costs are extremely high. By trying to integrate as many stakeholders as possible there's actually a lot of costs which are linked to the organization of meetings, the payments of per diems, etc. which are sort of eating up most of the funds actually in some cases. And there's some very strong need as well in terms of reinforcing accountability and financial management of those funds. And most importantly as well as we mentioned earlier these funds are not at all performance based. They are just a compensation mechanism so there's still some way to go before that performance based element could be potentially integrated into their work. So just to conclude a few lessons from those two experiences one of the key message I'd like to leave you with is that we need to keep things simple and manage expectations. As I mentioned it's very important to move away from the when talking about where to move away from maybe the traditional conservative forest concession or forest industry ways of looking at compensation of local communities but do a real assessment of what are the costs and the benefits for each of the stakeholders. Manage transaction costs because these actually eat up all the carbon rent. So there needs to be clear messages as to what are the real expectations of revenues that could be shared between the different stakeholders. Obviously the arrangements need to be clear and transparent and they need to build to the extent possible on existing mechanisms such as the local development fund in Congo that I've been talking about. And finally there needs to be a balance between equity and performance. Now moving to jurisdictional or even national red plus approaches there really needs to be this balance to be struck between the enabling conditions and the actual reward of activities. And strong safeguards need to be put in place to provide confidence to the stakeholders. And that includes for example including these beneficiary arrangements within the legal framework or at least some of the safeguards and guidelines that are linked to them. Putting in place complaint mechanisms of course to ensure the accountability and ensuring that any of those mechanisms that are being put into place and it's been already covered quite a lot by the colleagues are based on informed consent and consultation. I'm ending there. Sorry for being a bit long. Thank you very much.