New UK Prime Minister Rishi Sunak has pledged the UK’s continued support for conserving threatened forests around the world, through a funding program covering a third of the world’s forests, at the COP27 UN climate summit in Egypt. Sources: The Guardian, Timberbiz
Brazil is expected to join the initiative, under the incoming president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and new funding from the public and private sector will take the spending for forest conservation above US$20bn over the next five years. The moves form part of efforts to tackle emissions from land use, the second biggest driver of global heating, of which tropical deforestation is a significant component.
The Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, launched by the UK prime minister on Monday, builds on an initiative set up at the COP26 summit in Glasgow last year. The aim is to halt and reverse global forest loss by 2030, extending the programme with a further $1bn funding from Germany and bringing together 25 countries accounting for almost 60% of global GDP.
Of the US$12bn pledged for these efforts, about US$2.6bn has been spent. One of the problems with climate finance initiatives is they can take years to get off the ground, so disbursing about a fifth of the money for a five-year program in its first year shows the scheme is on track.
There will be no new UK funding for the partnership, however. Mr Sunak is under fire for aiming to cut UK aid programs by stealth by spending more of the money meant for overseas help in the UK, for instance on efforts to support Ukrainian refugees.
Private funding for the partnership has also increased. About US$7.2bn was committed to the program in Glasgow, and US$3.6bn will be pledged at COP27, bringing the total funds committed to US$23.8bn.
Three big initiatives to protect forests were launched at COP26: a commitment by more than 140 leaders to halt and reverse deforestation, the creation of a working group of producers and consumers of commodities linked to deforestation, and a commitment by commodity traders of soya, palm oil, cocoa and cattle to prepare a roadmap to align their business practices with the 1.5C target.
No high-quality data has yet been published on the effect of the agreement on global deforestation rates, which continued at a “relentless” pace in 2021. In the tropics, 11.1m hectares of tree cover were lost last year, including 3.75m hectares of primary forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss. Most disappeared in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Bolivia.
Boreal forests, mainly in Russia, experienced a record loss in 2021, driven by the worst wildfire season in Siberia since records began.
Last month’s election of Lula in Brazil has renewed hope for the future, with the three big tropical rainforest countries – Brazil, the DRC and Indonesia – understood to be in talks to form an alliance, nicknamed the “Opec of rainforests”, to coordinate on finance and carbon markets at UN environment talks.
The Amazon is dangerously close to a tipping point after years of deforestation under Brazil’s far-right outgoing leader, Jair Bolsonaro, and other Amazonian states are keen to restart conservation efforts.
