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Severe and worsening wildfires, floods, and storms have brought climate change to the doorsteps of millions of U.S. households and the nation’s financial system, forcing the crisis to the forefront of the international policy agenda. Although action is long overdue, there has been little political will to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, transition the global economy away from fossil fuels, and tackle the biodiversity crisis that is concurrent with—and linked to—climate change.1While scientists agree that the world needs to limit warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2021, global pledges remain short of this benchmark. An Analysis released2The U.N. The U.N. Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in November warned of the danger that current country goals would lead to a 2.4 degree Celsius increase global temperature. World leaders must set ambitious goals and translate past promises into action in 2022.
Forest conservation and restoration is a tool that countries can use to achieve their emission reduction goals. This tool is being used more frequently because people are increasingly aware that forests can be either carbon sinks or carbon sources. Forests naturally emit carbon but they are a net carbon sink. Between 2001 and 2019, 7.6 billion metric tons of carbon was absorbed by global forests.3annually. Simply put, conserving forests is a way to capture carbon dioxide, while converting forests into other land uses releases carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Since 2015, the rate of global deforestation—primarily driven by agricultural expansion—has been approximately 10 million hectares per year,438,600 sq. miles or an area about the same size as Virginia. Tropical regions are home to the majority of terrestrial biodiversity, making forest loss particularly severe.5Current deforestation, fire and other disturbances could lead to the Amazon rainforest becoming an actual carbon source rather than a sink.6
Forest fires driven by climate change—as well as historic mismanagement of forests that has steadily undermined ecosystem integrity and resilience—also release stored carbon. California wildfires produced 91 million tons of carbon dioxide in 2020.7—30 million more than the state’s annual power production emissions. Global wildfires in 2021 emitted 1.76 billion tons of carbon.8—equivalent to the emissions of 444 coal-fired power plants in one year.9Wildfires are likely to increase in severity and frequency as climate change worsens.10Create You can find more information atFeedback loop11It could derail climate and conservation gains and threaten many livelihoods.
It is clear that the world cannot solve the climate crisis if it doesn’t stop and reverse deforestation. This task is not as easy as increasing the forest footprint. The biodiversity and overall ecological integrity, as well as emissions reductions across the sector, are key factors in climate mitigation. Forests are also intrinsically linked to Indigenous peoples, local communities, and any policy that seperates forests from these communities could erase important voices and contribute towards the ongoing marginalization Indigenous peoples. Forest pledges should not be viewed solely through the lense carbon storage, but holistically as nature-based strategies. Biden’s administration must take a number of key actions to protect the climate benefits forests can bring to the table.
The United States’ current forest commitments
The Biden/Harris administration indicated its intention to address deforestation by making international and domestic commitments in the last year. The United States signed the following joint pledges at COP26. These pledges clearly recognize the importance of forests, particularly in tropical areas, for their mitigation potential.
- Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use,12The United Kingdom is the leader of the effort to stop and reverse global forest loss by 2030. This includes conserving and restoring forests, supporting sustainable development and reducing vulnerability, and reaffirming international financing commitments. The declaration is supported by more 140 countries.
- The Global Forest Finance Pledge13 backs up the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration, committing $19.2 billion to ending deforestation. This financing is mainly from preexisting public financial obligations, with the rest coming from private companies or philanthropies.
- Congo Basin Joint Donor Statement14 focuses on the world’s second-largest tropical rainforest region. Twelve countries and the Bezos Earth Fund contributed $1.5 billion to protect forests, peatlands and other carbon stores in the Congo Basin.
- Indigenous Peoples’ and Local Communities’ (IPLC) Tenure Joint Donor Statement,15The statement, which has been endorsed by a handful countries and philanthropies recognizes the importance of IPLCs in the preservation of tropical forests and the limited rights that these communities enjoy. The statement “welcomes,” rather than calls for, protecting IPLC land and resource rights. Forest tenure rights and recognition were pledged by signatories to $1.7 billion.
The United States also announced their Plan to Conserve Global Forests. Critical Carbon Sinks.16This supports the goal to stop global forest loss and restore at minimum 200 million hectares of forest by 2030. It uses a whole-of government approach to engage with global stakeholders. Along with domestic measures to restore protections for Tongass National Forest17By 2030, conserve 30% of U.S. lands und waters18 which would expand the nation’s natural carbon sink,19These pledges demonstrate that the administration is aware that deforestation, improperly managed forests and other factors contribute to the climate crisis.
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Forests have a higher value than carbon metrics
Forests can do more than provide mitigation benefits. They can help bridge climate change and biodiversity loss, the convergent human-caused crises. Trees should not be seen as carbon sticks, or another metric that nations could use on their net zero balance sheet. Scientists believe that 80 percent terrestrial plants and animals are found in forests.20This directly supports the lives and livelihoods more than 1.6 billion people.21 Done correctly, forest conservation is a nature-based solution—an umbrella term for actions that protect, restore, and sustainably manage natural systems. Nature-based solutions must be beneficial to human communities, while also maintaining or improving biodiversity and ecological integrity.22
While climate change is correctly understood to be an existential crisis and biodiversity loss is equally catastrophic, it is also a cause of great concern. Biodiversity—the diversity of life on earth23—underpins human existence. It provides priceless and countless ecosystem services, including creating oxygen through the respiration of terrestrial and marine organisms; supporting humanity’s food systems, both directly through fish and livestock and indirectly through soil nutrients and pollination services; and providing life-saving medicines.24Professor Sir Partha Dasgupta explains this in his book The Economics of Biodiversity, “From a financial perspective, just as diversity within a portfolio of financial assets reduces risk and uncertainty, so biodiversity increases Nature’s resilience to shocks, and thereby reduces risks to the ecosystem services on which we rely.”25Apart from its benefits to humanity, biodiversity has intrinsic, inherent value that cannot be captured in stock portfolios and bottom lines.
However, biodiversity is rapidly disappearing faster than ever since the disappearance dinosaurs. It is also 1,000 times more than it was before humans existed.26 This has resulted in an extinction crisis that is entirely of our own making—indeed, a sixth mass extinction that in part underpins what scientists define as the anthropocene, a new geologic epoch characterized by humans’ fundamental impact on the Earth. Habitat destruction and degradation, climate change, overexploitation, pollution and agricultural expansion are all factors that contribute to biodiversity loss. Scientists estimate that approximately 1 million species face extinction globally and that 25% of species on Earth are at risk. The loss of species can cause irreparable damage to the interconnected relationships that link ecosystems, which in turn reduces the ability of nature’s ability to provide crucial benefits now and limits its future potential.27
Forest management must be viewed in light of the extinction crisis as a priority. This will ensure that biodiversity gains and carbon benefits are considered as part of a nature-based solution to the problem and long-term benefits for society. It is important that policymakers prioritize actions that support or rebuild the ecological integrity and health of ecosystems. This requires following the best science available and investing at scale. There are clear signs that this scale can be quite large: Scientists—including the man who coined the term “biodiversity,” Thomas Lovejoy28—warn that deforestation in the Amazon region is pushing the world’s largest rainforest perilously close to a tipping point that will undermine its ability to create the weather systems that sustain it. The Amazon could become a savannah-like scrubland at this point.29Not only are they destroying one of the world’s most biodiverse ecosystems, but they also have far-reaching consequences for global weather systems and human communities. It is important to take coordinated action to avoid this scenario and its potentially devastating global ramifications.
Forest climate action faces global political challenges
These global forest pledges are not possible due to political and logistical obstacles. Brazil has seen an increase of deforestation since the Bolsonaro presidency.30Defend your rights. tTreatment of Indigenous Peoples31The weakening and reorganization of environmental protection laws.32These actions suggest that his government is unlikely take the necessary steps in order to protect Amazon.33 Indonesia, meanwhile, signed but almost immediately pulled back from the Leaders’ Declaration on Forest and Land Use, with the country’s environment minister saying that halting deforestation cannot come at the expense of economic development.34
However, this does NOT mean that only large forests should be protected. In a fragmented landscape, smaller forests are important refuges and corridors for biodiversity. Additionally, biodiversity provides adaptation benefits to local communities. For their livelihoods, many communities in the Global South, which are especially vulnerable to climate risks, are heavily and directly dependent on nature.35Some estimates suggest that 90 percent of the people living in extreme poverty worldwide are dependent upon forests.36This figure shows that forest-based climate action must adhere to the core principles of nature based solutions. In fact forest interventions that do little to support biodiversity gains may be long-term maladaptive.37
Nature-based solutions are most efficient when they are designed for long-term carbon sequestration and long-term benefits. However, increasing greenhouse gases emissions ultimately reduces their utility.38 Therefore, in the context of forest conservation, climate mitigation and biodiversity conservation are mutually reinforcing goals with numerous overlapping policy interventions—and policymakers must look beyond carbon metrics to measure success.
How to secure mitigation and conservation benefits
The U.S. national plans, COP26 forest pledges, can support ecological integrity. This can confer important climate and resilience benefits to both humans and nature. The following four steps should be taken by the Biden-Harris administration to reap the full benefits of these pledges.
Rethink success metrics
The scope of climate benefits that ecologically healthy forests offer cannot be measured by merely calculating forest protection in terms such as acres protected, carbon sequestered, or dollars appropriated. These approaches also risk co-opting nature-based solutions for carbon offset projects that do not provide biodiversity and adaptation benefits and can ultimately undermine the projects’ intended climate gains.39For example, prioritizing the sequestration of restoration projects can lead you to fast-growing monocultures or nonnative species, which offer minimal adaptation benefits and actually reduce biodiversity.
The United States should be a priority in protecting primary forests, as well as restoring forest to connect fragmented areas. It can do this by leveraging assistance programmes and multilateral development bank to deliver integrated climate- and biodiversity outcomes. Social factors and metrics should also be used to measure success, which should include the recognition of protection of at risk communities, land rights, and the resolution of nature crimes (see below). The Biden-Harris administration should also consider adaptation gains in order to ensure that mitigation measures don’t become inadaptive in the future.40However, it is clear that there are still many challenges in defining indicators to measure the success of adaptation progress and nature-based solutions.41
Take action on the supply-side drivers for deforestation
Both legal and illegal deforestation are driven by the expansion of agricultural production and commodity consumption.42This problem should be addressed by the Biden-Harris administration through enforcement, trade, and financial measures. These include supporting legislation, such as the bipartisan FOREST Bill.43It is a whole-of government approach to preventing key commodities from being produced on illegally cleared land. Coordination with the European Union44United Kingdom45They can further shift the global market away form these products by implementing deforestation policies that also address deforestation. Additionally, the administration should improve the ability to enforce the Lacey Act by enhancing the capabilities of relevant agencies.46which combats illegal wildlife and plant trade, and take additional steps to address corruption and crime associated illegal deforestation.
The administration should, for example, increase supply chain transparency, traceability, and accountability. Deforestation, biodiversity losses, and human rights should all be considered along with climate change.47Financial regulations can help address deforestation from a marketplace perspective and preserve the ecosystem services upon which the global economy depends. The federal government should use its purchasing power to reduce deforestation. Federal procurement should not support unsustainable sourced commodities, products, or materials.
Prioritize ongoing and enhanced engagement with international IPLCs
The Biden-Harris administration has taken historic steps to incorporate the considerations of Native Americans, Alaska Natives, and Pacific Islanders into its climate agenda, but international climate justice policies and actions fall short of the president’s commitment to domestic climate justice in Justice40.48The initial endorsement of the joint tenure statement on Indigenous peoples, local communities and other issues announced at COP26 by the United States, Germany and Norway was only from the United Kingdom. The United States should encourage other countries to sign this pledge.
The United States should expand its support by conditoning foreign aid on the repeal of IPLCs’ harmful laws, developing initiatives that address the human rights crisis facing IPLCs, as well as directing funding and capacity building for IPLCs that are pursuing natural climate solutions that place emphasis on the link between climate change, biodiversity, and climate change. Regular consultations must be held with IPLC groups, tribal governments, and/or representatives at all levels of government. International climate justice must be a primary climate strategy and not an afterthought. Recognizing and protecting the rights of Indigenous peoples—and holding entities that perpetuate violence against IPLCs accountable—is critical to achieving global climate goals.
Up to 2022, fill vacant positions in U.S. agencies
The Trump administration saw a significant brain drain in the U.S. government. Many career officials left federal employment or retired, bringing with them decades of institutional knowledge and expertise. The Biden-Harris administration must prioritise filling these vacant positions, especially within the U.S., in order to achieve an ambitious whole of government approach to climate change. Departments of Interior, Agriculture, and State, just to name a few. This would allow executive actions like the Plan to Conserve Global Forests to be sustained through future administrations. Agencies can also hire staff who are experts in the intersections between climate, finance and corruption to help them target the supply-side causes of forest loss.
Conclusion
Global climate impacts continue to worsen. 200 people were killed in Europe last year by floods that were linked to climate change.49 and July 2021 was Earth’s hottest month on record.50Nearly half of Americans grew up in countries that suffered from climate catastrophes in 2021.51With the resulting damages exceeding $145 billion52This is compounded by the fact that U.S. greenhouse gases emissions rose last year.53Moving the 2050 net-zero goal further away54International leaders and the Biden-Harris administration must use every tool at their disposal to combat climate change. This includes halting and reversed deforestation. While the sequestration benefits of forest conservation—and nature-based solutions generally—are not a substitute for the rapid and necessary phaseout of fossil fuel use,55The biodiversity and adaptation benefits that these interventions provide are essential to a comprehensive response to climate change.
Forests are vital ecosystem services that provide life-giving ecosystem services for communities all over the globe and play an important role in the climate crisis. They can either be a carbon sink, or source, and the loss forests can have devastating consequences for livelihoods and lives. The Biden-Harris administration should take steps to ensure that its forest based climate interventions are able to fulfill their promise of nature-based solutions, strengthening ecological integrity and conserving diversity.
