On 23 May 2014 in Brussels, DG Climate Action hosted a meeting of the Working Group (WG) 5 under the Climate Change Committee. This WG5 focuses on the "Implementation of the LULUCF Decision and policy development of the land use, land use change, and forestry sector". Ana Frelih-Larsen, a Senior Fellow at Ecologic Institute, participated in the meeting, presenting the study "Mainstreaming climate change in the rural development policy post 2013." The presentation slides are available for download.

Land use, land - use change and forestry (LULUCF) is an inventory sector which covers anthropogenic emissions and removals of GHGs resulting from changes in terrestrial carbon stocks. The EU LULUCF Decision (No. 529/2013) requires that Member States must be able to account for and report the GHG emissions and removals from activities on cropland, grazing land, forests and afforested, reforested and deforested land by 2020. In addition, it obliges Member States to prepare Action Plans setting out measures to limit or reduce emissions, and to maintain or increase removals from the LULUCF sector.

In the WG 5 meeting, progress on the implementation of the EU LULUCF Decision was discussed, and various ongoing activities relevant for the LULUCF sector were presented.

Ana Frelih-Larsen’s presentation focused on preliminary results of the project Mainstreaming climate change into rural development policy post 2013. In her presentation, she outlined the inventory of new and innovative climate actions, the methodology behind selecting these new and innovative actions, as well as technical fiches which provide guidance to Member States on how these actions can be supported by rural development programmes. New and innovative actions refer to those actions which have not yet been commonly applied in rural development programmes, or which have been commonly applied but can be substantially improved in order to optimise their mitigation and adaptation effects. The technical fiches provide detailed information on the expected climate impacts, ancillary effects, and costs/benefits which are anticipated from the different actions. Additionally, the guidance also illustrates how to control implementation of actions as well as the barriers and challenges to implementation under rural development programmes.

The guidance developed by the project can also support Member States in identifying measures to include in LULUCF Action Plans, and provide insights into how these Action Plans can be linked to rural development programmes.