Forests & land use
High Forest, Low Deforestation (HFLD)
Definition
High forest, low deforestation describes countries or jurisdictions that retain large shares of their original forest cover — commonly operationalised as more than 50 per cent forest cover with annual deforestation below about 0.22 per cent — and therefore have little historical deforestation on which to base traditional REDD+ credits. Roughly three dozen countries, including Suriname, Guyana, and Gabon, meet the definition and collectively hold a major share of remaining tropical forest carbon.
References
Supports definition and framing.
Supports definition and framing.
Overview
What it means
HFLD countries face a paradox: REDD+ was designed to reward reductions against a deforestation baseline, but HFLD jurisdictions have almost no baseline to reduce — so conservation success goes unrewarded while the economic logic of clearing forests intensifies. Crediting approaches such as ART-TREES's HFLD module attempt to fix this by scoring jurisdictions on maintained forest cover, not just avoided emissions.
How it is used
The category shapes forest-finance negotiations, jurisdictional REDD+ crediting, and Article 6 discussions on rewarding standing forests.
Why it matters
The last large intact forests are the hardest to protect precisely because current finance only pays for stopping destruction already underway. **Note:** 1352 HFLD aliases to this entry.