Leaders of more than 100 countries pledge to end deforestation by 2030
Leaders of more than 100 countries pledge to end
deforestation by 2030
World leaders will conclude a two-day climate summit on Tuesday with a
multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030 – a date too far away
for campaigners who want action sooner to save the planet’s lungs.
World leaders will conclude a two-day climate summit on
Tuesday with a multibillion-dollar pledge to end deforestation by 2030 – a date
too far away for campaigners who want action sooner to save the planet’s lungs.
The pledge was to be issued at the UN’s COP26 conference,
which will continue for another fortnight to try to craft national plans to
forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming.
The summit’s chair, British Prime Minister Boris
Johnson, said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching
ambition of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“These great teeming ecosystems—these cathedrals of
nature—are the lungs of our planet,” he was expected to say in Glasgow,
according to Downing Street.
“Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply,
and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our
very survival,” Johnson said.
“With today’s (Tuesday’s) unprecedented pledges, we will
have a chance to end humanity’s long history as nature’s conqueror, and instead
become its custodian.”
The pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and
private funding, and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85
percent of the world’s forests, the UK government said.
The leaders include those of forest-rich Brazil and Russia, both
condemned by activists for accelerating their own rates of deforestation,
along with US President Joe Biden and
others.
President Joko Widodo of resource-blessed Indonesia said
his own archipelago’s rainforests, mangroves, seas and peatlands were key to
restricting climate change.
“We are committed to protecting these critical carbon sinks
and our natural capital for future generations,” he said in a UK government
statement.
“We call on all countries to support sustainable development
paths that strengthen the livelihoods of communities—especially indigenous,
women and smallholders.”
10 more years
The pledge to “halt and reverse deforestation and land
degradation by 2030” encompasses promises to secure the rights of indigenous
peoples, and recognise “their role as forest guardians”.
But while Johnson said it was “unprecedented”, a UN climate
gathering in New York in 2014 issued a similar declaration to halve the rate of
deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.
However, trees continue to be cut down on an industrial
scale, not least in the Amazon under the far-right government of Brazilian
President Jair Bolsonaro.
Almost a quarter of all man-made emissions of carbon dioxide
can be attributed to land use activity such as logging, deforestation and
farming.
Humans have already cut down half of all Earth’s forests, a
practice doubly harmful for the climate when CO2-sucking trees are replaced
with livestock or monoculture crops.
Greenpeace criticised the Glasgow initiative for effectively
giving the green light to “another decade of deforestation”.
“Indigenous peoples are calling for 80 percent of the Amazon
to be protected by 2025, and they’re right, that’s what’s needed,” said
Greenpeace Brazil executive director Carolina Pasquali.
“The climate and the natural world can’t afford this deal,”
she said.
Many studies have shown that the best way of protecting
forests worldwide is to keep them under the management of locals with
generations of preservation knowledge.
“We will be looking for concrete evidence of a
transformation in the way funds are invested,” said Tuntiak Katan Jua from the
COICA indigenous organisation.
“If 80 percent of what is proposed is directed to supporting
land rights and the proposals of Indigenous and local communities, we will see
a dramatic reversal in the current trend that is destroying our natural
resources,” he said.
