First technical meeting of the Interim REDD+ Partnership concludes with snores in Brazilia, amid further criticism from global civil society.

The Partnership, recently established by close to 60 countries at the Oslo Climate and Forest Conference, aims to work bilaterally alongside the UN to provide quick-start financing for REDD in time for COP16 in Cancun. In May it pledged around USD 4.0 billion for the period 2010-2012 for measures to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries.

Since the meeting in Brazilia, there have been no official statements and no information has been released on the official website about the progress of the Partnership, other than some tweets from a Brazilian delegate who photographed a Japanese negotiator sleeping, claiming it ‘symbolized the spirit of the meeting.’ He later tweeted that nothing was decided at the meeting, except the need for further discussions.

Even when apparently dormant, the Partnership is still a source of concern for civil society organisations. “Respect for indigenous peoples' rights and support for the implementation of safeguards still under discussion at the UNFCCC are not among the Partnership's principles,” said the Forest People’s Programme, an NGO supporting Indigenous participation in UN-REDD. “The process so far has been evidently lacking in terms of transparency and participation.”

This month’s meeting in Brasilia saw an invite sent to a randomly selected list of 12 organisations only one week before the meeting itself. Three subsequent letters of complaint, signed by 40 organisations, Climate Action Network and WWF, were sent to the Partnership Chairs over the terms on which civil society was asked to participate.

Uproar was also caused at the first Partnership meeting in Paris when the doors were closed to Indigenous Peoples as 64 forest countries and donor governments met in Paris on March 11^th to discuss prospects for the future funding of REDD.

The next official technical meeting of the REDD+ Partnership will be held in Nagoya, Japan, in October.