Nations Commit to Fight Climate Change by Restoring Forests [View all]

[Judi Lynn]

Nations Commit to Fight Climate Change by Restoring Forests
Wednesday, 24 September 2014, 1:52 pm

More Nations Commit to Fight Climate Change by Restoring Forests

Global leaders more than double restoration targets and commitments

New York, 23 September 2014 (IUCN) – World leaders announced new pledges to restore over 30 million hectares of degraded forest lands today at the UN Climate Summit in New York. The commitments come from Ethiopia, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, and Uganda, among others, and more than doubled the number of hectares contributing to achieving the Bonn Challenge—a global goal to restore 150 million hectares of deforested and degraded lands by 2020.

These announcements came alongside an extension of the global restoration target to at least 350 million hectares—an area greater than the size of India—to be restored by 2030. This new target was unveiled at the Summit today in the New York Declaration on Forests. The Declaration, signed by IUCN, as well as more than 100 countries, corporations, indigenous peoples and civil society also calls for a halving of deforestation rates by 2020 and an end to global deforestation altogether by 2030.

“The courageous leadership demonstrated by these countries towards achieving the Bonn Challenge, and by the wide range of global leaders in support of the New York Declaration on Forests, underlines that nature-based solutions such as forest landscape restoration can play a vital role in our fight against climate change and addressing the fundamental need to reduce emissions,” said Julia Marton-Lefèvre, Director General of IUCN.

IUCN estimates that meeting the 150 million hectare Bonn Challenge target alone could add approximately US$ 85 billion to national and local economies and remove an additional one billion tons of carbon from the atmosphere each year.

More:
http://www.scoop.co.nz/stories/WO1409/S00155/nations-commit-to-fight-climate-change-by-restoring-forests.htm