World leaders attending the COP26 UN climate summit should focus on setting ambitious goals to end deforestation — and expand funding and rules to drive forest protection, environmentalists are urging.
More than 100 world leaders have confirmed they will attend next month’s COP26 UN
climate summit in Glasgow in person.
One key aim for the conference is moving finance out of polluting fossil fuels — especially coal — which are responsible for the lion’s share of climate-heating emissions.
But green groups say the importance of carbon-storing forests in curbing global warming is being overlooked by many nations — especially in their climate funding — with limited progress on transforming economies to become deforestation-free.
In 2015, about 195 countries agreed to limit the rise in global average temperatures this century to “well below” 2C and ideally to 1.5C above preindustrial levels.
“COP26 provides a great opportunity to establish forests at their rightful place, high on the climate agenda,” said Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, a US-based think-tank.
“We need to start thinking about tropical deforestation the way we think about coal: we have to phase it out as quickly as possible, otherwise the goals of the Paris Agreement will remain out of reach,” she said.
Cutting down forests has major implications for global goals to curb climate change, as trees absorb about a third of carbon emissions produced worldwide, which they release if they rot or are burned.
Forests also provide food and livelihoods, help clean up air and water, support human health, are an essential habitat for wildlife, aid tropical rainfall and offer flood protection.
But in 2020, tropical forest losses around the world equalled the size of the Netherlands, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch.
Of the world’s original rainforest, about a third has already been completely destroyed, while another third is in a degraded condition, said Toerris Jaeger, secretary general of the Oslo-based Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN).
All emissions reduction scenarios that limit warming to 1.5C “depend on urgently ending and reversing this destruction of the rainforest”, he added.
Forests sequester over 7bn tonnes of carbon dioxide annually — 1.5 times more than that pumped out by the United States, the world’s second-largest emitter, said Danny Marks, assistant professor of environmental politics and policy at Dublin City University.
But emissions from forests have been increasing recently.
“If we want to address climate change, we need to stop deforestation,” said Marks.
That must change, he added, pointing to the more than 1bn people who depend on forests for their livelihoods.
He also noted that the potential for forests to mitigate carbon emissions is higher than other solutions because preserving them avoids their carbon stocks being released, while as restored forests grow, they also capture carbon from the air.
Stopping deforestation, alongside other efforts to protect natural systems like mangroves and wetlands, could get the world more than a third of the way to limiting warming to 2C, he said.
It is also cost-effective as it does not require expensive or unproven technology like carbon capture and storage for reducing emissions from industrial processes, he added.
Marks said less than 3% of funding for measures aimed at reducing emissions is devoted to forest protection.
“COP26 therefore represents a crucial opportunity for countries to immediately do more on forests,” he added. — Thomson Reuters Foundation