UN climate plans too narrow to save forests
NORWAY: World efforts to slow deforestation should do more to
address underlying causes such as rising demand for crops or biofuels,
widening from a UN focus on using trees to fight climate change, a study
said Monday.
It said a series of projects to protect forests had had limited
success in recent decades UN figures show that 13 million hectares (32
million acres) of forest were lost every year from 2000-09, an area
equivalent to the size of Greece.
The report by the International Union of Forest Research
Organizations (IUFRO) suggested that the current UN-led efforts to
protect forests had too narrow a focus on promoting trees as stores of
carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.
“Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact of forests on
sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any new international
efforts whose goal is to conserve forests and slow climate change,” said
Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO panel and is a professor at the
University of Saskatchewan. Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10
percent of all emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities.
Trees soak up carbon as they grow but release it when they burn or
decay.
The IUFRO study said a key problem was that deforestation, from the
Amazon to the Congo, was often caused by economic pressures far away.
A popular global brand of cookies, for instance, uses palm oil grown
on deforested land in Indonesia.
Oslo, Monday, Reuters |