The States of Campeche, Yucatan and Quintana Roo - the States of the Yucatan Peninsula - developed a joint REDD+ Strategy in 2013. The States of the Yucatan Peninsula have been participating in the REDD+ SES Initiative since 2013 to support the developement of social and environmental safeguards for their REDD+ Strategy. The process in the Yucatan Peninsula has been supported by the M-REDD Alliance.

Governance

Facilitation team

A group of States focal points was established with two representatives from the Environment Secretaries of Yucatan, Campeche and Quintana Roo. The group is responsible for following the process of interpretation of standards and ensuring alignment with the national process. The Secretary of Environment of Campeche was designated the focal point for safeguards. 

A facilitation team was created in January 2014 for the development of SIS and use of REDD+ SES. The facilitation team is composed of the Environment Secretary of Campeche (government - focal point for safeguards in the Peninsula), Bioasesores and Pronatura Campeche (civil society) and Ithaca (consultant). A support group was created composed of the M-REDD partners (The Nature Conservancy, Rainforest Alliance and CONAFOR) and the REDD+ SES Secretariat to provide guidance and technical support to the Yucatan Peninsula facilitation team. Eventually, the support group was integrated in to the facilitation team to facilitate the coordination of activities and avoid multiple meetings.

REDD+ Standards Committee

The facilitation team organized a call for nominations between February and March 2014 to establish a multi-stakeholder standards committee to oversee use of REDD+ SES in the Yucatan Peninsula including the interpretation of REDD+ SES to the Peninsula context and ensuring that stakeholders' groups interests and vision will be taken into account. A series of criteria related to experience and representation were established for selecting the members. The committee is composed of 22 representatives from local government, civil society and communities (ejidos) of the three States. 

The Committee was established in August 2014 and defined its responsibilities and rules of work. A report that documents the process for establishing the governance and compiling lessons learned was produced by the facilitation team.

Capacity building

Between April and August 2014, the facilitation team organized a series of capacity building on REDD+ and safeguards for the committee and other stakeholders to enable them to fully participate in the process of interpreting indicators for SIS based on REDD+ SES. 

• April 2014: workshop with the Consultative Technical Council (CTC) of Quintana Roo
• May 2014: meeting with the Consultative Technical Council (CTC) of Yucatan
• July 2014: workshop with representatives of federal, state and local government, private sector and community producers in Campeche
• July 2014: workshop with the Consultative Technical Council (CTC) of Yucatan
• August 2014: workshop with representatives of civil society and producers members of the 'Learning community' of M-REDD in Yucatan
• August 2014: workshop with the Standards Committee

To support the capacity building process, the M-REDD Alliance developed some capacity building materials on REDD+ safeguards with support including a video and a poster.

 Interpretation

The Standards Committee was responsible for the interpretation of REDD+ SES to the context of the States of the Yucatan Peninsula. The Committee first prioritized the REDD+ SES criteria according to social and environmental impacts an opportunities that could result from the implementation of REDD+ activities through the forest investment plans in the Yucatan Peninsula. These forest investment plans include the Special Programme for the Yucatan Peninsula (PEPY) of CONAFOR and Project 3 of the Forest Investment Plan (FIP) coordinated by Financiera Rural.

The process for interpretation of indicators followed the following steps :

1. Generate indicator specific qualifiers for each indicator of the prioritized criteria by programme and component
2. Identify considerations for the formulation of SMART indicators (Specific, Measurable, Appropriate, Realist and Time bound)
3. Present and discuss the interpretation of indicators developed for each program

The Standards Committee held three meetings to complete the interpretation of indicators for the Yucatan Peninsula and approved the final version of indicators in December 2014.