Most scientists and experts agree that forests are critical to stabilizing the global climate, and the 2015 Paris climate agreement
recognized the need to “conserve and enhance” their carbon
sequestration potential. But three years after the deal, forests and
their capacity as regulators of emissions still aren’t recognized on the
same level as the energy sector.
Part of the reason is that forests aren’t viewed as a permanent part
of the solution, Donna Lee, an independent climate change and land use
consultant, said.
“There seems to be a fear that if we invest in forests, they may all
go up in smoke in a few years,” Lee told Mongabay in an email. “We
forget that forests have been a permanent fixture on our planet for
millennia.”
In a report
released by the San Francisco-based Climate and Land Use Alliance in
November, Lee and her colleagues contend that world leaders should
embrace the climate change-mitigating potential of forests. Indeed,
mounting evidence, including a 2018 paper
from the Climate, Land, Ambition and Rights Alliance, suggests that it
won’t be possible to hold the global temperature rise below the
1.5-degree C (2.7-degree F) limit laid out in the Paris climate accord
unless standing forests are maintained and degraded areas are allowed to
recover.
“I do think ‘natural climate solutions’ tend to be underappreciated
and underfunded,” she said. “Recent reports suggest that while natural
options, in particular forests, can be some 30% of the near-term
solution, forests capture about 2% of climate mitigation finance.”
Forests lock away 1.3 times more carbon than found in the world’s
untapped energy resources, Lee and her coauthors write. They also argue
that reversals — that is, changes to the permanent status of a carbon
sink or source after it has been accounted for — are possible in the
energy sector, just as they are with forests.
“They can happen in any sector,” Lee said. For example, a country
might shy away from an energy strategy that’s heavily dependent on
nuclear power because of the risk of accidents. The switch to new
sources of energy will change the amount of carbon that the country is
responsible for releasing into the atmosphere.
A worry with forests is that the greenhouse gas emissions accounted for in countries’ nationally determined contributions might
rest on standing forest, which could then be cleared away shortly after
that. But Lee said that holding countries liable under the “once in
always in” provision of the Paris rulebook, which was approved at the 2018 United Nations climate conference in Poland, will help ensure that those changes aren’t missed.
“Now countries are responsible for all forests and for a long period
of time,” Lee said. “This is a critical piece of the new rulebook.”
Often, Lee said, forests are only seen as either a static repository
of carbon or as a source of emissions when they’re cleared or degraded.
But focusing on that part of the equation discounts their full potential
in slowing the warming of the earth, she said.
“The wonderful thing about lands and forests are that they also
remove [carbon dioxide] from the atmosphere,” Lee said. What’s more,
over the long term, reforesting areas that have been cut down and
rehabilitating degraded forests could expand the role of the land
sector.
“It’s not easy, however,” she said. “And I don’t think it is
necessarily ‘cheap.’” But she noted that forests aren’t as costly as
most “carbon capture technologies.” Similarly, she and her colleagues
write that the earth’s carbon sinks, of which forests are the most
prominent, are the only current solution that can soak up the massive
amounts of carbon that we humans release into the atmosphere.
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