In 2018, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) identified pathways to curtailing global emissions to 1.5Oc—all included planting forests and protecting existing forests to reduce and avoid further emissions. Catastrophic forest fires, made worse by climate change, sharply increased the urgency to adapt forest management practices. New research showed that biodiversity loss is even more severe than originally thought, with unprecedented levels of deforestation and land degradation. PROFOR...
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The shift to a low-carbon future that includes clean technology such as solar panels, wind turbines, electric vehicles and batteries will require a lot of minerals. In fact, experts predict that between now and 2050 we will need more minerals than have been produced over the past 100 years. This mineral-intensive future has implications for our forests, vital to mitigate global warming. A...
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According to WRI's ‘Global Forest Watch’, from 2001 to 2017, 337 million hectares of tropical tree cover was lost globally – an area the size of India. So, we appear to be losing the battle, if not the war, against tropical deforestation, and missing a key opportunity to tackle climate change (if tropical deforestation were a country, it would rank 3rd in emissions)...
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Across the world, over 3 billion people cook with solid biomass over traditional stoves resulting in negative impacts on health and the environment.  In Latin America this number is around 90 million people. In this blog, I want to focus on the case of Haiti, where 93 percent of people (2.2 million households) cook with solid fuels and some 80 percent of urban households use charcoal as their primary cooking fuel. This fuel has implications on health – burning charcoal exposes cooks and family...
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A new report Forests for Green Pakistan highlights that while the forest cover in Pakistan is low, covering just 5.1 percent of the total land area, the contribution of forests to Pakistan's national economy and to the livelihoods of forest-dependent communities is significant.    Forests benefit the economy and forest-dependent communities in several ways. For example, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO 2009), 68...
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Forests are critical for sustainable development as they provide oxygen, significantly help curb climate change, are home to a majority of global biodiversity and provide livelihoods for nearly 2 billion people. But deforestation is accelerating. It is estimated that mining accounts for up to 7% of forest loss in developing countries. “Forest-smart mining” will be needed to both minimize direct and indirect impacts of mining on forests and to pursue opportunities for positive forest outcomes. This will require public policies, corporate practices and multi-stakeholder partnerships to address...
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Haiti is a country of mountains and fields. Roughly 80 percent of the land is covered in rocky ridges, and the vast majority of rural areas are divided into small, privately-owned, cultivated plots. Haiti’s natural forests, once abundant, have gradually disappeared due to a complex mix of economic, political and demographic factors dating back 500 years. The country’s ecology is also shaped by a history of powerful storms: in October 2016, for example, Hurricane Matthew barreled across Haiti’s...
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Water. Clean air. Biodiversity. Nutrient-rich soil. These are all forest ecosystem services that have value for the economy, society and wellbeing, but because we tend to take them for granted, forests are often exploited unsustainably for short-term gain.  One way around this market failure is to...
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Forest resilience—“the ability of forest ecosystems to return to a pre-condition state following a disturbance, including maintaining its essential composition, structures, functions and process rates”—is fundamental to the well-being of the people, economies, and ecosystems that depend on and are inextricably linked to forests. Forests provide a critical carbon sink, absorbing nearly a third of fossil fuel emissions, with the potential to absorb even more. Unfortunately, forest resilience is challenged on many fronts: deforestation, degradation, fires, population growth, shifting consumption...
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Agriculture provides most of the world’s food. It also contributes the most to global deforestation. This does not mean, however, that we need to choose between feeding a rapidly growing population and protecting the forests that are so essential to our wellbeing....
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