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Tropical rainforests of Latin America (LATAM) are one of the world's largest carbon sinks, with substantial future carbon sequestration potential and contributing a major proportion of the global supply of forest carbon credits. LATAM is poised to contribute predominantly towards high-quality forest carbon offset projects designed to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, halt biodiversity loss, and provide equitable conservation benefits to people. Thus, carbon markets, including compliance carbon markets and voluntary carbon markets continue to expand in LATAM. However, the extent of the growth and status of forest carbon markets, pricing initiatives, stakeholders, amongst others, are yet to be explored and extensively reviewed for the entire LATAM region. Against this backdrop, we reviewed a total of 299 articles, including peer-reviewed and non-scientific gray literature sources, from January 2010 to March 2023. Herein, based on the extensive literature review, we present the results and provide perspectives classified into five categories: (i) the status and recent trends of forest carbon markets (ii) the interested parties and their role in the forest carbon markets, (iii) the measurement, reporting and verification (MRV) approaches and role of remote sensing, (iv) the challenges, and (v) the benefits, opportunities, future directions and recommendations to enhance forest carbon markets in LATAM. Despite the substantial challenges, better governance structures for forest carbon markets can increase the number, quality and integrity of projects and support the carbon sequestration capacity of the rainforests of LATAM. Due to the complex and extensive nature of forest carbon projects in LATAM, emerging technologies like remote sensing can enable scale and reduce technical barriers to MRV, if properly benchmarked. The future directions and recommendations provided are intended to improve upon the existing infrastructure and governance mechanisms, and encourage further participation from the public and private sectors in forest carbon markets in LATAM., Competing Interests: Declaration of competing interest The authors declare that they have no potential real or perceived conflict of interest. Authors Marcela Rondon, Ewane Basil Ewane, Jorge F. Montenegro, Austin Blanton, Judith Pons, and Midhun Mohan, were employed by the company Ecoresolve Inc. The remaining authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest., (Copyright © 2023. Published by Elsevier Ltd.)

One important debate regarding Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD+) in developing countries concerns the manner in which its implementation might affect local and indigenous communities. New ways to implement this mechanism without harming the interests of local communities are emerging. To inform this debate, we conducted a qualitative research synthesis to identify best practices (BPs) from people-centered approaches to conservation and rural development, developed indicators of BPs, and invited development practitioners and researchers in the field to assess how the identified BPs are being adopted by community-level REDD+ projects in Latin America. BPs included: local participation in all phases of the project; project supported by a decentralized forest governance framework; project objectives matching community livelihood priorities; project addressing community development needs and expectations; project enhancing stakeholder collaboration and consensus building; project applying an adaptive management approach; and project developing national and local capacities. Most of the BPs were part of the evaluated projects. However, limitations of some of the projects related to decentralized forest governance, matching project objectives with community livelihood priorities, and addressing community development needs. Adaptive management and free and prior informed consent have been largely overlooked. These limitations could be addressed by integrating conservation outcomes and alternative livelihoods into longer-term community development goals, testing nested forest governance approaches in which national policies support local institutions for forest management, gaining a better understanding of the factors that will make REDD+ more acceptable to local communities, and applying an adaptive management approach that allows for social learning and capacity building of relevant stakeholders. Our study provides a framework of BPs and indicators that could be used by stakeholders to improve REDD+ project design, monitoring, and evaluation, which may help reconcile national initiatives and local interests without reinventing the wheel. Evitar la Reinvención de la Rueda en un Acercamiento a REDD+ Centrado en Personas [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]