The landmark agreement reflects a growing recognition of nature’s role
in helping to address global warming. Still, critics said it wasn’t ambitious
enough.
Leaders of more than 100 countries, including Brazil, China,
Russia and the United States, vowed at climate talks in Glasgow to end
deforestation by 2030, in a landmark agreement that encompasses some 85 percent
of the world’s forests.
“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature
— are the lungs of our planet,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said in
describing the pact on Tuesday at an event attended by President Biden and the
president of Indonesia, Joko Widodo.
The pledge will demand “transformative further action,” the
declaration said, to preserve forests crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and
slowing the pace of global warming. But while it was accompanied by several
measures intended to help put it into effect, some advocacy groups criticized
the agreement as lacking teeth, saying it would allow deforestation to continue
and noting that similar efforts have failed in the past.
At the heart of the plan is the effort to reduce the lucrative financial incentives to cut down forests. Much of the world’s deforestation is driven by the world’s demand for food, driving people to fell trees to make room for cattle, soy, cocoa and palm oil.
The agreement brings together countries including Brazil,
where deforestation in the Amazon and elsewhere has spiked in recent years. But
as often happens in diplomatic negotiations, securing widespread buy-in that
entices the most critical countries to join comes with potential weaknesses. Unfortunately, Argentina and Paraguay did
not sign the agreement.
“It allows another decade of forest destruction, and isn’t
binding,” said Carolina Pasquali, executive director of Greenpeace Brazil.
“Meanwhile, the Amazon is already on the brink and can’t survive years more
deforestation.”
Nevertheless the pledge underscores a growing awareness of
the role of nature in tackling the climate crisis, something Britain has sought
to highlight at the climate summit, known as COP26. Intact forests and
peatlands are natural storehouses of carbon, keeping it sealed away from the
atmosphere, where as carbon dioxide it speeds warming by trapping the sun's
heat. But when these areas are logged, burned or drained, the ecosystems switch
to releasing greenhouse gases.
If tropical deforestation were a country, it would be the
third-biggest emitter of greenhouse gases in the world, according to the World
Resources Institute. Only China and the United States emit more.
Twelve governments committed $12 billion, and private
companies pledged $7 billion, to protect and restore forests in a variety of
ways, including $1.7 billion for Indigenous peoples. More than 30 financial
institutions also vowed to stop investing in companies responsible for
deforestation. And a new set of guidelines offers a path toward eliminating
deforestation from supply chains.
President Biden said he would work with Congress to deploy
up to $9 billion to the global effort through 2030. “Preserving forests and
other ecosystems can and should play an important role in meeting our ambitious
climate goals,” he said.
While that number fell short of a campaign trail promise of
$20 billion for the Amazon, it represents a vast increase on past efforts from
the United States. Any money related to climate change, though, would likely
face opposition from Republicans.
Several policy experts called the suite of measures an
important step forward, while emphasizing that far more is needed. “The
financial announcements we’ve heard in Glasgow are welcome but remain small
compared to the enormous private and public flows — often in the sense of
subsidies — that drive deforestation,” said Frances Seymour of the World
Resources Institute, a research group.
Previous efforts to protect forests have struggled or
failed.
One program recognized in the Paris climate accord, the
agreement among nations to work together in an effort to fight climate change,
seeks to pay forested nations for reducing tree loss. But progress stalled. In
2014, an international pact known as the New York Declaration on Forests aimed
to end deforestation by 2030, and a United Nations plan announced three years
later, built on that pledge, yet deforestation continued.
Supporters of the new agreement point out that it expands
the number of countries and comes with specific steps to save forests.
“What we’re doing here is trying to change the economics on
the ground to make forests worth more alive than dead,” said Eron Bloomgarden,
whose group, Emergent, helps match public and private investors with forested
countries and provinces looking to receive payments for reducing deforestation.
The participating governments promised “support for
smallholders, Indigenous Peoples and local communities, who depend on forests
for their livelihoods and have a key role in their stewardship.”
A growing body of research shows that nature is healthier on
the more than quarter of the world’s lands that Indigenous people manage or
own. But they receive less than one percent of the climate funding aimed at
reducing deforestation in tropical countries, according to Rainforest
Foundation Norway.
Tuntiak Katan, the general coordinator of the Global
Alliance of Territorial Communities and a member of the Shuar people in
Amazonian Ecuador, praised the support for Indigenous and local communities but
questioned throwing money at a system he sees as broken. “If this financing
doesn’t work directly, and shoulder to shoulder, with Indigenous peoples, it’s
not going to have the necessary impact,” he said.
The value of healthy forests goes far beyond their ability
to store away carbon. They filter water, cool the air and even make rain,
supporting agriculture elsewhere. They are also fundamental to sustaining
biodiversity, which is suffering its own crisis as extinction rates climb. This
year, though, scientists found that parts of the Amazon have begun emitting
more carbon than they absorb, as drier conditions and increased deforestation
led to more fires and a degraded ecosystem.
China is one of the biggest signatories to the deforest
declaration, but the country’s top leader, Xi Jinping, did not attend the
climate negotiations in Glasgow. China suffered heavy forest losses as its
population and industry grew over the past decades, though more recently, it
has pledged to regrow forests and to expand sustainable tree farming.
By China’s estimate, forests now cover about 23 percent of
its land mass, up from 17 percent in 1990, according to the World Bank. Though
some research has questioned the scale and the quality of that expanded tree
cover, the government has made expanded reforestation a pillar of its climate
policies, and many areas of the country are notably greener than they were a
couple of decades ago.
Still, China’s participation in the new pledge may also test
its dependence on timber imported from Russia, Southeast Asia and African
countries, including large amounts of illegally felled trees.
In tropical forest countries like Brazil and Indonesia, the
deal will test a different kind of economic development. The United States and
Europe grew wealthy in part by cutting down their forests generations ago. But
now, with the world facing the climate crisis and biodiversity loss, they need
to persuade developing countries to not follow in their footsteps — despite the
powerful financial incentives.
“Can we develop without deforestation first?” asked Ana
Toni, executive director of Brazil’s Institute of Climate and Society, a
climate advocacy group. “This is the big challenge. That’s why we need to have
an international effort.”
Reference
“Global Leaders Pledge to End Deforestation by 2030”. NY
Times. By Catrin Einhorn and Chris Buckle. Nov. 1, 2021
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