Solutions: Protecting Forests

We must protect forests to save our climate.

Around 20 per cent of the world's greenhouse gases come from deforestation. Yes, 20%. Almost all of this comes from tropical rainforests.

It works like this. Trees soak up carbon dioxide, preventing it from being released into the atmosphere. When forests are destroyed by logging, burning and other means, the carbon dioxide trapped in the trees, their roots and the soil is released into the atmosphere.

Deforestation releases huge amounts of greenhouse gas, contributing to dangerous climate change.

How to protect forests

It’s a sad fact that dead trees have an economic value and living trees don’t. Right now, the world’s forests are worth more dead than alive. To reverse this, Greenpeace is fighting for a Forest for Climate fund, which would be paid for by industralised countries around the world and agreed to at the 2009 Copenhagen climate meeting. This fund will pay developing countries to preserve their forests and provide better monitoring and enforcement of forest protection laws.

The fund will make it more economically viable to protect forests rather than destroy them.

Payments to the Forests for Climate fund would be based on the proportion of a country’s own carbon pollution. The more they pollute, the more they pay. This would be separate and in addition to the country’s own efforts to reduce their carbon emissions.

Find out more at the Greenpeace International website

Deforestation in the Pacific

In Indonesia, peatland forests are wiped out by logging, draining, then burning to make way for palm oil plantations. These peatlands (sometimes 12 metres deep) store huge amounts of carbon. When they are cleared and burned, it's like setting off a carbon bomb, releasing nearly two billion tonnes of dangerous carbon dioxide every year.

Indonesia is the world's third largest climate polluter, behind the US and China. A massive 85% of Indonesia's emissions come from forest destruction and peatland conversion.

In Papua New Guinea, an estimated 83% of commercially accessible forests will be cleared or degraded by 2021 if current logging rates continue1. Papua New Guinea's remaining forests store almost twice the emissions released from all the world's fossil-fuel power stations in 2004. Logging these forests would release these emissions and contribute vast amounts of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

More solutions:

 

(1) Shearman et al, The State of the Forests of Papua New Guinea, University of Papua New Guinea (2008), available 18/8/08 at UPNG Remote Sensing Centre.

 

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Peat forest fires burn in Indonesia

Peat forest fires burn in Kampar Penisula, Giam Siak Kecil, Indonesia. 85% of Indonesia's greenhouse emissions come from destroying forests and converting peatlands. © Greenpeace

Our plan to save the forests

Greenpeace is aiming for zero deforestation in the world’s tropical forests by 2015. The Forests for Climate fund is key to making this happen and must be agreed to at the Copenhagen climate meeting in December 2009.

If countries commit to the Forests for Climate fund, everyone wins – the climate, biodiversity, and local communities and forest peoples. Priority must be given to protecting forests with a high conservation value and those that are important for the livelihoods of indigenous peoples and forest communities.

The Greenpeace Forests for Climate fund:

  • is one of the quickest, most effective and the least expensive ways to reduce carbon emissions
  • puts forest protection at the forefront of any deal to help protect the climate
  • is ongoing – every year funds would be made available for forest protection

Further reading