We’re Cutting Down One of Our Best Defenses Against Global Warming

Forests, it’s long been known, are key players in the fight against climate change, pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and storing it in their roots, branches, and surrounding soil.  But it’s also long been known that forests around the world aren’t receiving the protection they need to ensure that they keep up this crucial service.

Now, a new report has quantified just how much time protecting forests will buy us in our efforts to mitigate climate change.  The report, published Thursday by the Woods Hole Research Center, found that “aggressive management” of tropical forests in particular would give the planet 10 to 15 more years in which to reduce emissions enough to keep the world at 2 degrees Celsius — the point under which climate scientists agree warming should be kept to avoid the worst consequences of climate change.

Right now, the report found, tropical forests release 1.2 pentagrams of carbon per year (or 1.2 billion metric tons) through deforestation.  As forests are cut down or burned to make way for agriculture and development, they release the carbon they were storing back into the atmosphere. These emissions from forests are cutting into the world’s carbon budget.  If we keep up our present rates of deforestation — rates that are slowing worldwide but are still leading to huge forest losses in some continents — we’ll have about 19 years to bring emissions under control enough to keep warming to 2 degrees.  But, if we were able to halt forest loss and degradation, we’d have about 33 years to scale down our fossil fuel use.

Stopping all forest degradation and destruction is, of course, a best-case scenario, said Philip Duffy, president and executive director of Woods Hole and one of the authors of the report.  It’s also not likely to happen anytime soon.  But that was the point of the report, he said:  to give a benchmark of what could happen in a best-case scenario world.
...
A more realistic scenario would be reducing forest loss by implementing better economic incentives, Duffy said.  The programs that are in place right now, like REDD (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) and the Green Climate Fund, should be fully funded, he said.  And in general, deforestation needs to be a bigger part of the climate change conversation.
...
Another paper, released alongside the Woods Hole report, makes the case that giving indigenous people more rights would lead to better conservation of forests.  The report, published by the Rights and Resources Institute, states that indigenous communities “have customary rights to a large portion of the world’s remaining tropical forests, as well as millions of hectares of degraded forests that could capture additional carbon through restoration.”  Even by conservative estimates, it’s thought that 20 percent of the carbon stored in tropical forests is claimed by indigenous people in Indonesia, Amazonia, Mesoamerica, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.  But very few of these communities actually have legal ownership of these forests.  If they did, the report states, it would be good news for the climate.

“Research shows that when [indigenous communities] have legally recognized and enforceable rights, both deforestation and carbon emissions can be significantly lower compared with areas outside of community forests,” the report reads.  “For example, community and indigenous forests in Brazil store 36 percent more carbon per hectare, and emit 27 times less carbon dioxide from deforestation than forests not under community control.”

Read more at We’re Cutting Down One of Our Best Defenses Against Global Warming