A couple of years ago, we came across an ambitiously titled book: “Drawdown: The Most Comprehensive Plan Ever Proposed to Reverse Global Warming”.
The author, Paul Hawken together with an army of climate researchers, assessed and compiled a list of 80 solutions from a range of sectors such as transportation, food, buildings, and land use, which can have the biggest impact in climate change mitigation. The book’s brilliance lies in mapping out, for the first time, a comprehensive set of pragmatic climate solutions we can research, develop and mobilise into the future.
We decided to create a Drawdown Series to review and dive deep into the complexities of it’s top 10 solutions. These are, in no specific order: Reduced Food Waste, Health and Education, Plant-Rich Diet, Refrigerant Management, Onshore Wind Turbines, Alternative Refrigerants, Utility-Scale Solar PV, Clean Cookstoves, Distributed Solar PV, and Tropical Forest Restoration.
Today, we will be discussing the importance of Tropical Forest Restoration in developing the climate action agenda.
Not quite the tropical paradise…
Tropical forests are some of nature’s world wonders — home to thousands of endemic plant and animal species. This natural phenomena work as critical regulators to the Earth’s climate by absorbing carbon dioxide and releasing oxygen for our and other species’ survival.
However, in recent decades, they have suffered through extensive deforestation and depletion. As Paul Hawken from Drawdown states what was:
“Once blanketing 12 percent of the world’s land masses, they now cover just 5 percent”
It seems like it’s a daily occurrence that we stumble on a news article highlighting that we lost another large area of forests in the Amazon or South East Asia due human causes. It’s as if we have become numb to such loss and the way we are living is a clear benefactor in the imbalance of our natural systems. Put short: we are losing more tropical forest than is being restored. This is very problematic.
Some climate models[1] have indicated that the potential loss of forest habitat in tropical regions could amount to tropical forest loss more than four times the size of China by 2050 (c. 450Mha). To put things on a long-term perspective, a study conducted in 2017 modelled the future of deforestation highlighted that we could hit complete deforestation in the 2200s unless we start changing our ways today. Let those sink in.
When forests are lost, largely due to human settlement or agricultural bailout, carbon dioxide is discharged into the atmosphere since trees hold a vast amount of carbon in their biological structures. Tropical forests are not the only things that are lost; a loss of habitats and biodiversity, excessive discharge of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and structural issues to local communities.
Biodiversity loss
A consortium of researchers found in 2016 that human disturbance in tropical forces can double the biodiversity loss from deforestation. Since tropical forests are home to nearly two-thirds of all land plants and animals, it is clear that business-as-usual disturbance and forest loss would be irreplaceable. Biodiversity contributes to critical genetic material used in the pharmaceutical industry, thus any sustained significant loss is a worrying equation to a growing global population.
Carbon in the atmosphere
Since tropical forests act as important carbon sinks [2], when structurally intact they can remove about 15% of our emitted carbon during a 20-year stretch (as witnessed between 1990 and 2010). However, among current trends of sustained deforestation, they are becoming less effective at removing growing levels of carbon. This means that to ensure our natural systems continue to remove carbon from our atmosphere effectively, we will need to rely more heavily on secondary forests in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres to do the same.
Structural issues to local communities
From the Amazon to Africa and across to the island of Borneo, areas of tropical forests are home to indigenous, culturally-rich and marginalised communities. The forests provide a sustainable way of life through ecosystem services and significant connections to nature that provide mental and physical well being benefits. Even a minimal loss to a way of life creates structural problems such as increased poverty, reduction in wellbeing and potential migration.
How can we restore tropical forests?
Restoration begins with policy…
Enacting policy that ensures that environmental and social issues are addressed must lead the way for tropical forest restoration.
Getting past major policy hurdles are critical to the success of tropical forest restoration. For instance, Indonesia, home to around a third of Asia Pacific’s tropical forests, enacted a new rule to allow their protected forests to be up for grabs to improve their food self-sufficiency. Considering Indonesia has axed tropical forests equivalent to the size of New Zealand in the past 20 years, it’s unfortunate to see environmental policy lag.
However, international policy can take an exemplary lead, such as the Paris Agreement’s Article 5 stating that countries “should take action to conserve and enhance…forests”. Programmes such as the United Nations REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) aims to incentivise developing countries to keep their forests standing by offering results-based payments to reduce or remove forest emissions. By incorporating a global programme led by nations’ environmental policies, innovative solutions can be developed to ensure tropical forests are restored.
Another example is the Bonn Challenge, which was outlined in 2011 as an ambitious target of restoring 150 million hectares of forest worldwide by 2020. As of the latest data released late last year, the Bonn Challenge has surpassed this and restored 200 million hectares, with an overall goal of restoring 350 million by the end of the decade. It is clear that the need to restore forests will not decline.
It’s crucial that we sustain continuous and transformative action moving forward and we do not fall victim to such phenomena as the ‘enthusiasm gap’[3] within tropical forest restoration:
To sustain enthusiasm we need to continue to care…
In order to ensure sustained action — put bluntly: we need to continue to care enough to carry on doing so. While it sounds simplistic and abstract, without an inherent value on tropical forests, there will be slower action. This doesn’t mean purely from an economic standpoint, but it is to evaluate things that are larger than ourselves. Corporations and governments must take action and us individuals must take care to consume in a way that does not degrade our tropical forests further.
Naturally this can be difficult considering the economics of products coming from tropical forests. Slash-and-burn practices are common among producers of palm oil, especially in Indonesia, and the production of this has almost doubled since 2007/2008 — largely due to it’s inexpensive nature in food products compared to butter or other hydrogenated vegetable oils. Worldwide, the demand for palm oil has continued to rise, with developing nations such as India consuming a whopping 17% of the stuff — largely due to changes in consumption patterns and a rising urban population.
Sustaining enthusiasm must take into account these complexities, and nations with capacity should look to innovating to find alternative products at cost-parity to products such as palm oil. To get past the ‘enthusiasm gap’ of tropical forest restoration, international policy developments require longer-term accountability so maybe enacting robust laws on climate change can lead the way?
Finance must match restoration needs
One critical way to accelerate tropical forest restoration is to ensure money flows in the right direction. This can be done through securing land tenure by local landowners — which can be pivotal to reduce investment risks.
A common hindrance to generating greater finance flows to forest restoration has been the inability of symbiotic support by public and private actors. If restoration efforts disproportionately target countries with a positive investment climate over those that fundamentally require transformational restoration — sufficient progress can be weak and inefficient.
Establishing and maintaining strong supporting structures through international cooperation is paramount to ensure priority is given to the areas in most restoration need.
Private and public investors can also work together in partnerships to create new opportunities for tropical forest restoration — sometimes referred to as blended financing. If a combination of correct policy matches financing needs, investment can be channelled into conservation and restoration.
Many funds of this nature exist, such as the Land Degradation Neutrality Fund (LDNF), a $300M pot launched by the United Nations aimed to address land degradation. The LDNF invested into another fund (URAPI Sustainable Land Use) and together with people on the ground, have used it’s proceeds to promote restoration and conservation of the Western Amazon rainforest. It is important that these types of funds are scaled up and there is greater participation among a variety of different stakeholders to ensure tropical forests are restored.
“By ensuring policy, finance and individual care are accountable and focused on long-term benefits and minimisation of losses, we can make progress.”
The benefits outweigh any associated costs…
The benefits of tropical forests restoration provide us with a plethora of opportunity and critical sustainment of livelihoods.
Project Drawdown ranks Tropical Forest Restoration as #5 in solutions to reverse global warming. According to Hawken and researchers, initiating this on a global scale can reduce a potential 61 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide from our atmosphere (equivalent to half of the Earth’s carbon cycle). While reducing that quantity of emissions sounds ambitious, and even utopian given our population and societal growth, it is clear that tropical forest restoration is critical to all species living on Earth.
Tropical forest restoration is not only environmentally beneficial, but intricate complexities of social issues entangle themselves with the steps that we take. By ensuring policy, finance and individual care are accountable and focused on long-term benefits and minimisation of losses, we can make progress.
Notes:
[1] These climate models are in effect used under two Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs) of RCP 4.5 and 8.5 (which are GHG emission pathways given certain socioeconomic conditions). A RCP 8.5 scenario is a scenario whereby emissions stay on course with a business-as-usual scenario (with little mitigation through policy and/or business).
[2] Carbon Sinks :Forests and other ecosystems that absorb carbon, thereby removing it from the atmosphere and offsetting CO2 emissions. The Kyoto Protocol allows certain human-induced sinks activities undertaken since 1990 to be counted towards Annex I Parties’ emission targets. (Source: European Environment Agency, 2021).
[3]The ‘Enthusiasm Gap’ occurs due to the policy attention cycle, which illustrates the increase and decrease of interest in an issue over time. Stanturf et al. (2019) elude to this in forest restoration where the recognition of the need for reversing deforestation and degradation can be dated to prehistory, however enthusiasm for forest landscape restoration (FLR) only started as a policy issue in the late 20th century with the realisation of the damages that were done. Forest restoration is in stage 2 or 3, however in order to ensure this does not decline, enthusiasm must be kept because the need will not decline (Source: Stanturf et al., 2019)
Originally published at recirkl.com on January 25, 2021.
