Forest Pathways
Most people are aware that the world’s forests are critical allies in combatting climate change, halting and reversing the global biodiversity crisis, and that they provide livelihoods for nearly a fifth of the world’s population. But what is the global community doing to secure and enhance the world’s forests?
We recently had the pleasure of working with WWF and Equilibrium on the Forest Pathways Report 2023 . The report is a look at which of the many forest-related commitments are working and which are not, and what needs to be done – with urgency – over the next few years. The report spans everything from global commitments to on-the-ground pilot projects, stories about iconic trees and thought-pieces about some of the profound changes that must take place to reverse forest loss and degradation.
The need to protect forests is one of the few almost universally agreed political aims, enshrined in multiple international treaties, commitments, goals and targets. These include the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use and the New York Declaration on Forests. But in the time since the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration was signed, in November 2021, at least 4.7 million hectares of primary tropical rainforest has been lost.
The underlying reason is not hard to find. The key drivers of deforestation and forest degradation are unsustainable agriculture and food systems. At least US$378 billion per year is spent on environmentally harmful subsidies in the agricultural sector, including subsidies to crop commodities that drive forest loss. This lowest estimate is still more than 100 times the highest estimate of public funds currently pledged to activities that promote forest protection, sustainable management and enhancement – US$2.2 billion per year –less than 1% of the US$460 billion per year needed to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. It is hardly surprising then, that the many global commitments to end deforestation and restore forests – themselves usually imprecise in their aims and with no clear way of measuring progress – are failing by any reasonable measure.
But there are signs of hope. Forests covering twice the area of France have regrown, rather than being replanted, since 2000. Forest restoration practitioners are increasingly realising that complex, interconnected forest landscapes are more likely to provide carbon, biodiversity and social benefits and be more climate-resilient forests than monocultural stands of exotic trees (which may capture carbon in the short term but do little else). Real-world examples include forest regeneration in North Yorkshire, which is beginning to create a more complex, sustainable landscape, and the restoration of wildlife corridors in Nepal, which have benefited local communities, tigers and elephants. The Amazon Region Protected Areas Programme has created 27 million hectares of protected areas in the last 20 years.
Innovative thinking, such as a ‘Global Environment Bank’ are increasingly seen as realistic options. Such a facility would essentially gain mandatory contributions from the private sector and use the revenues to finance forest protection and restoration. This would remove one of the key limitations that has prevented voluntary commitments by the private businesses and the financial sector from having had any meaningful impact on deforestation, by removing the need for a financial return on investments.
In summary then, we have become better at measuring forest loss and understanding the reasons for it in recent years. The next steps are to back solutions that work and carry on innovating to find new ways of protecting and restoring forests in local contexts. We owe it to extraordinary trees, such as the Bristlecone pine (the oldest being over five thousand years old), the walnut (a valuable food, but bizarrely connected to deforestation on the other side of the planet from where it grows) and the baobab (used and worshiped by Africans for millennia) to look after the world’s forests.