The UN’s climate change conference in Bonn ended on Tuesday in an encouraging agreement on the Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD) programme in developing countries. This agreement will be part of the Paris climate pact, which is to be drafted by December 2015. Indigenous people living in the equatorial forests of Africa and South America, where REDD schemes have been implemented, have protested being displaced from their lands and not receiving a fair share of the funds allocated to their governments to implement these schemes. For this reason, REDD has been unable to proceed to the next phase for decades. The conference resulted in the UN agreeing to establish safeguards to ensure that REDD schemes protect biodiversity and indigenous people. Whether these safeguards will be implemented remains to be seen and critics are sceptical as to whether they are enough to make REDD both successful and acceptable to locals. An undertaking of this scale is certainly going to pose several hurdles but it is critical for all the countries involved to ensure its implementation, as the world adapts to the worsening effects of climate change. The UN has realised that countries need to be convinced that the long term benefits of protecting carbon-rich forests outweigh any short-term profits that logging may bring. The costs of the REDD+ programme are worth the mitigation of climate change and reduction in carbon emissions and the UN has established several funds to that effect. Pakistan joined the UN REDD programme in 2011 but to receive REDD+ benefits, the forestry department and other related institutions would have to achieve the goals laid out in the REDD+ readiness roadmap. During the UN Forum on Forests, Federal Minister for Climate Change Mushahid Ullah Khan claimed that Pakistan has achieved the target of having 12 percent protected areas but the goal of increasing the forest cover in Pakistan from about two percent to six percent of the total land area is still far from being achieved. The time and effort that it would take to plant and sustain new forests aside, even the remaining forests continue to decline and remain threatened by loggers and forest degradation caused by climate change. The REDD+ programme is an appreciable step for several reasons. Climate change is a global problem that is affecting the economies, ecosystems and food security of the entire world and needs to be dealt with on an international scale. Furthermore, at the rate at which carbon emissions and global warming continue to increase, forests that reduce emissions need to be protected and prioritised in national agendas. Practical issues will continue to arise as the programme is implemented and will need to be solved along the way with the inclusion as stakeholders of indigenous peoples. *