�The current state of forests: what’s the issue and why is it so important?�Trivia Answers & Resources
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Forests are key to stabilize and regulate the climate, and ecosystems. They host biodiversity, provide food, medicine, water regulation, supply wood, oxygen, and they play an integral part in the carbon cycle. ��In fact, the livelihoods of around 1.6 billion people depend on forests. Additionally, around 90% of the people living in extreme poverty globally (which is 8% of the population or 620 million people), depend on forests for at least part of their livelihoods.��Therefore, the construction of, for example a mine, in any given forest ecosystem, will affect not only the forest as a group of trees, but also the existing water system, flora/fauna systems, biodiversity and forest-dependent communities.��Resources & further reading: ��The Global Forests Goals Report: Realizing the importance of forests in a changing world
�Global Forest Coalition Website
31% of the world’s land area is covered by forests. ��With so much of the world being covered by forests and forests being the home to the most terrestrial biodiversity, the state of our world’s biodiversity (currently in crisis) totally depends on our interactions with forests.��Resources & further reading: ��Global Forest Watch��The State of the Worlds Forests 2020��Global Forest Resources Assessments�
Forest absorb annually 2.6 billion tonnes of CO2, about one-third of the CO2 released from burning fossil fuels.
Forests act as a two-way highway, absorbing CO2 when standing or regrowing and acting as one of the main carbon sinks. Tropical rainforests in particular absorb more CO2 than other types of forests.
However, they can also act as a source of carbon emissions when deforestation and degradation takes place due to, for instance, clearing for plantations, uncontrolled fires and expansion of the agricultural frontier.
Resources & further reading:
Forests Absorb Twice As Much Carbon As They Emit Each Year
How much can forests fight climate change?
Indigenous Peoples own, occupy and manage 28% of the world’s surface area�
Indigenous Peoples make up around 5% of the global population and live in 28% of the world’s surface area.
However, they manage up to 80% of the remaining biodiversity. Their highly important role in preserving and managing ecosystems worldwide, including forests, is undeniable.
Thus, it is key to protect the rights of Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women. Their rights must be fully respected and upheld in all forest-related policies, and customary systems of forest governance and conservation, including territorial rights to land.
Resources and further reading:
Community Conservation Resilience Initiative
Indigenous Mapuche Play Key Role Protecting Chile’s Environment
Gender justice at the heart of forest conservation for Indigenous women in Africa
Forest loss exacerbates all forms of existing inequalities such as gender inequality and creates new inequalities.
The current neoliberal model that drives export-oriented extractive industries and in turn biodiversity loss and deforestation, has many impacts on communities and rights holders.
Under this model that often subjugates people’s rights in pursuit of profit, there is a prevalence of and reliance on women’s unpaid labor around care and domestic work (such as collecting food, water and fuel), which becomes harder in conditions of biodiversity and forest loss. Women and girls’ burdens are heavier, hindering opportunities for education, livelihoods and other priorities.
Lack of gender justice in turn affects biodiversity and forest conservation as the rights, participation and decision-making of women and other diverse groups in communities go unrecognized as do their unique traditional knowledge, priorities and perspectives
Resources & further reading:
Forest conservation must address violence against women
Women’s rights and traditional knowledge are crucial for conserving biodiversity in Kyrgyzstan
Women2030 global shadow report: Gender equality on the ground
Globally, 38.7% of employed women are working in agriculture, forests and fisheries but only 13.8% are land holders.
Land tenure rights for communities and for women in communities continue to be a major obstacle to gender justice and environmental justice in general.
Women and Indigenous Peoples who often have no formal land rights, are not able to assert their rights and cannot depend on justice systems, while company owners are protected by the authorities due to their shared interests.
Laws regarding land use and ownership where land is state-owned and the state grants the rights to use it, make it very easy for land to be taken away from communities and given to private interests with far more influence, especially where companies can claim that land is degraded, marginal or abandoned, and therefore in need of economic development.
Companies taking advantage of dubious land appropriation practices are common. Take for example the company Portucel in Mozambique which deceived communities to acquire their land for eucalyptus plantations to supply Portugal’s pulp and paper industry.
Resources & further reading:
Women’s leadership in forest conservation and governance is central for an equal future
Deforestation and forest loss arising from extractive industries and large-scale agriculture can be seen as rooted in patriarchal and colonial paradigms around uses of land. The appropriation and grabbing of land for such activities undermines community land tenure rights and can threaten forced eviction and involuntary displacement of communities. Impunity of governments and corporations is rife.
The expansion of extractive industries and accompanying commodity trade can have significant negative impacts on the livelihoods and work burden of women by replacing small-scale, locally sustainable production of staple foods, livestock, and medicinal plants, in which indigenous and rural women tend to play a central role. In general, the possible benefits afforded by industrial activities to indigenous and rural women differ widely than to urban and/or elite women and families.
Resources & further reading:
The big four drivers of deforestation: beef, soy, wood and palm oil
Contrasting food production models: forest destruction in Brazil vs forest conservation in Chad
Currently, beef and soybean are the two commodities that cause the most deforestation globally
Resources & further reading:
Large-scale cattle farming and its consequences for forests, agroecology and biodiversity
What’s at stake? The real cost of meat
World Food Day and the fires next time: Mortgaging the future of the planet for meat and dairy
Plantations are not Forests!
Promoters of commercial monoculture tree plantations (for example companies in paper & pulp industry, palm oil, bioenergy production) say that such plantations are forests and can grow and thus store carbon relatively rapidly.
However, plantations aren’t an effective way of storing carbon and in fact, natural forests are 40 times better at it than plantations.
Also, commercial tree plantations provide none of the benefits that real forests provide. They destroy biodiversity, damage soil fertility, dry up freshwater resources, and alter rainfall patterns. In fact they are often known as green deserts.
They are of no cultural value, with very limited livelihood opportunities for Indigenous Peoples, local communities and women, and with limited economic benefits and employment opportunities; two of the main arguments often used by companies and public administration to implement plantations. Monoculture tree plantations are also very often associated with land grabbing and other conflicts with communities.
Resources & further reading:
Should tree plantations count toward reforestation goals? It’s complicated
The impacts of tree plantations on women & women-led resistance to monocultures
Our Nature is Not Your Solution – and FAO’s Plantations are even less of a Solution!
More CO2 is released per unit of energy from woody biomass burning or bioenergy, than from coal.
Bioenergy production is linked to deforestation, air pollution, land grabbing, and human rights violations. Industrial-scale bioenergy increases greenhouse gas emissions, harms biodiversity, and reverses the original intent of renewable energy policies by increasing greenhouse gas, air pollution and biodiversity loss.
A lot of advocacy work is being done by civil society demanding politicians and decision-makers to exclude bioenergy from renewable energy policies and to end subsidies and other incentives that exist today for the burning of wood. For instance, in the EU over 500 scientists sent a letter and over 40.000 people signed a petition to the EC asking to end tree burning for energy.
Resources & further reading:
Burning trees is not a climate solution petition
Letter regarding the use of forests for Bioenergy
Bioenergy in West Africa – impacts on women and forests
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Between 4 and 6 trillion US dollars is spent annually on agroindustrial subsidies and other perverse incentives that cause deforestation and biodiversity loss.
Perverse incentives refer to measures or policies that bring about behavior that is harmful for biodiversity, often as unanticipated side effects as policies are designed to achieve other objectives (like agricultural expansion)
While many heads of state have confirmed the need for strong action to promote sustainable food systems and halt climate change, forests and biodiversity loss, in practice, unsustainable livestock farming and other forms of industrial food production are still heavily incentivized by governments (through subsidies and tax breaks for example).
Existing multilateral agreements to eliminate, phase out or reform these perverse incentives, have not been complied with.
The main reason these perverse incentives continue is that the very corporations benefiting from them often have a disproportionate influence over national and international policy-making.
Resources & further reading:
There is not a positive relationship between forest conservation and investments in the forestry sector.
A 2015 comparative analysis of the relationship between forest conservation and investment in the forest sector in 19 countries that successfully halted and reversed forest cover loss found that there is no statistical relationship between the two.
While a few countries that received significant funding for forest conservation and other forest investments had halted or reversed forest cover loss, many countries with minimal investments in their forest sector, including the least developed countries, had stable and even increasing natural forest cover.
In addition, forest conservation and investment for it, may sound very positive at first glance but often large-scale, top-down, strict conservation programmes and policies, for example to create national parks, have historically excluded and violated the (land) rights of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs) who have lived and relied on their local forests for time immemorial.
Forest conservation that isn’t driven by IPLCs or doesn’t respect their free, prior and informed consent or is not inclusive can be problematic for people and for forests. Evidence has pointed to the fact that forests are better conserved when land tenure rights are afforded to IPLCs.
Resources & further reading:
Agents, Assumptions and Motivations behind REDD+
Community Conservation Resilience Initiative
Market- based schemes to address climate change, such as carbon offsets, are often criticized by civil society groups and climate justice movements because:
Resources & further reading:
Market mechanisms and money: an overview of what’s at stake at COP25 in Madrid
Women & Gender Constituency Key Demands
Could forest carbon offsetting be an effective solution for addressing deforestation and climate action?
Many governments, companies and organizations promote schemes to offset your CO2 emissions, as it draws funds to forestry projects overseas. But such carbon offset schemes and carbon markets have been established to allow rich countries, rich companies and consumers in general, to continue polluting by giving them the option to “offset” their pollution through investing in projects, including so called forest projects.
These carbon offset schemes are very often based on dubious tree planting projects that claim to remove carbon through protecting forests, when in fact the forests were already being conserved by women, Indigenous Peoples and local communities.
Offsets schemes and projects are mostly implemented in the Global South which moves and places the burden far away from where most emissions are actually happening and many of these offset projects have been involved in scandals related to human right violations.
Instead addressing these urgent issues, the aviation industry - one of the most polluting ones - has opted to continue business as usual, devising schemes to offset emissions through carbon trading.
We need real and drastic cuts in emissions to address the climate crisis, not offsets and carbon trading.
Resources & further reading:
International Civil Aviation Day: Say no to carbon offsets for aviation!
Aviation, carbon offsets and tourism: a recipe for disaster
Forest offsets for air travel: the new frontier in nature-based solutions
REDD is a policy scheme that stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation
After 15 years and over USD $4 billion in direct finance, REDD+ continues to be one of the most hotly contested intergovernmental schemes.
REDD+ does not address the underlying causes of deforestation and forest degradation, and while deforestation can be avoided in one place, REDD+ projects are not able to mitigate the risk that deforestation will simply move to another region or country. For example, when the demand for commodities such as palm oil and soy remains high, there can be no guarantee that their production won’t simply move from a forest protected by a REDD+ project to another area with no such protection.
It can only reduce emissions temporarily because it will eventually be released back into the atmosphere when the tree dies, is cut down or burns. This means that REDD+ projects can only deliver temporary results, which is particularly problematic if these temporary results are used to compensate permanent emissions from fossil fuels
Most times there are no clear benefits for Indigenous Peoples, local communities or women. Communities around the world have pointed out that mere forest protection without respecting and protecting the rights of Indigenous and other forest dependent peoples represents a direct threat to their way of life. Over the last decade there have been numerous reports that REDD+ projects have resulted in land and human rights violations.
Resources & further reading:
15 years of REDD+: Has it been worth the money?
The term nature-based solutions (NBS) was introduced in the early 2000s as an umbrella concept for ecosystem-based approaches to mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss, and it has gained much momentum in the last two or three years.
While NBS do not necessarily have to be bad, unfortunately, this concept has already been twisted by vested interests to falsely brand highly questionable practices as “green” and rebrand old scams and schemes with a catchier name.
False solutions to deforestation and the climate crisis such as offsets are often lurking under the shadow of the “nature-based solutions” umbrella and the ambiguity that surrounds the terms.
That is why we prefer to use well-defined and already adopted terminology that excludes these false solutions, such as Ecosystem based approaches and initiatives led and governed by local communities, Indigenous Peoples and women.
Resources & further reading:
#OurNatureIsNotYourSolution, International Day for Biological Diversity
Roll up, roll up! The Net Zero Circus is coming to a forest near you
�The Big Con: How Big Polluters are advancing a “net zero” climate agenda to delay, deceive, and deny
In recent years, tree planting fever has taken hold, with governments and the private sector increasingly committing to planting more and more trees and “restoring” millions of hectares of ecosystems, like the “1 Trillion Trees” initiative.
Planting native trees to restore forest ecosystems has a vital role to play in mitigating the impacts of climate change and protecting biodiversity, however, efforts must be led and governed by local communities, Indigenous Peoples and women.
Instead, many of these tree planting initiatives rely heavily on monoculture and commercial tree plantations. For example, an assessment of government pledges made under the Bonn Challenge last year found that tree plantations were the most popular “restoration” option, with 45% of all commitments involving planting vast monocultures of trees. In addition, harmful commercial tree plantations as a climate mitigation strategy are also increasingly financed with public tax-payers money.
Resources & further reading:
Why the Green Climate Fund must reject Arbaro’s plantations
An investigation into the Global Environment Facility-funded Green Charcoal Project in Uganda
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