1990 - 2020: 1 Billion Acres Of (Mostly Tropical) Forest Lost; Credit/Offsets "Riddled" W. Problems
As government leaders and forestry experts gathered in South Korea this week to discuss the state of the world’s forests, new research suggests that ambitious international efforts to curb deforestation are making insufficient progress and the planet’s trees continue to disappear. On Wednesday, an international consortium of researchers released an assessment of the sweeping United Nations-sponsored program, known as REDD+, that was launched 15 years ago to compensate developing countries—home to most of the planet’s climate-critical tropical forests—for conserving and protecting their trees.
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REDD, which stands for Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation, was initially launched in 2007 at a U.N. conference on climate change. Over the following three years the “plus” was added to its name as it transitioned into its current form—a framework in which high-income countries pay for voluntary efforts by lower-income countries to restore and conserve forests. But the details on how these exchanges would occur were thin. “It was an idealistic idea with very little meat to it,” Mansourian noted. Since then, U.N.-led programs and international funds, including the Green Climate Fund, have pledged roughly $2.4 billion toward forest conservation efforts through REDD+. About $500 million of that total has been fully allocated to eight countries, including Brazil and Indonesia, as “results-based payments.”
But in another assessment, also published this week to coincide with the World Forestry Congress underway in South Korea, the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) says that the financial commitments need to be scaled up significantly—to about $200 billion a year “by 2030 to meet climate, biodiversity and land degradation neutrality targets.” “The tragedy of forest finance is that it has not been tried at significant scale. There’s just not enough money going into conservation that can compete in the marketplace with what’s being spent by big meat and big chocolate companies,” said Glenn Hurowitz, the head of Mighty Earth, a forest advocacy organization. “The goal is to make these forests more valuable standing than dead. There’s not enough money to achieve that goal.”
The FAO’s new report says that more than 1 billion acres of forest, mostly in the tropics, were lost between 1990 and 2020. And while rates of deforestation are slowing, the world still lost 25 million acres of forest a year between 2015 and 2020. When trees are left standing, they store carbon in their roots and the surrounding soils, absorbing as much as 29 percent of all man-made carbon emissions. Currently, about 10 percent of annual global carbon emissions occur from forests being cut or damaged, the report says. (Degraded forests, which are more difficult to measure than deforestation, contribute about one-third of these emissions.)
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https://insideclimatenews.org/news/04052022/forest-funding-climate-change-redd/
