 Destroying tropical forests releases more carbon dioxide than the world's cars, buses, trucks and trains combined. That's why for the last 15 years, nearly 200 countries have been discussing the best way to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. The mechanism that's been agreed on is called REDDPLUS. It's a financing mechanism to provide incentives to developing countries to reduce emissions from forested lands. REDDPLUS is also expected to generate important benefits such as biodiversity conservation, poverty alleviation and ecosystem services. But what kind of benefits might people in tropical forested countries expect to receive? Who should get a share of these benefits? Under what conditions? For how long? These are just some of the questions that have made it difficult to design efficient, equitable and effective REDDPLUS programs and policies. For the last four years, the Centre for International Forestry Research has been learning about what works, what doesn't work and what is crucial to consider when designing policies for sharing benefits from REDDPLUS. This knowledge tree synthesizes that research. We have made it easy for you to explore different practical policy options and guidance which we hope will improve the design, development and implementation of REDDPLUS benefit sharing mechanisms in national and local government decision making. Explore the context side to better understand what impact our current policies, economics and capacity have on the way we design the institutions, structures and instruments for distributing benefits from REDDPLUS programs. Explore the design side to uncover the questions we need to ask ourselves when designing ways to share benefits from REDDPLUS. We suggest you start with the section labeled Types of Benefits. Interested in what a particular country is doing? See all the relevant research in the list of publications section. So that's the benefit sharing knowledge tree. Click around to get a better handle on this crucial but complex topic.