Unlike the food options at the venue, the Glasgow initiatives include an astonishing array of new announcements to scale up forest and “nature” climate action. Yay! Amazing, right? But, hold on… doesn’t this sound familiar?
Let ECO look back for a moment at all the forest climate initiatives of the last decades and see if they worked at all. Wait! Don’t get us wrong. ECO does so in the spirit of increasing understanding of the blockages, rules, and perverse incentives created by the UNFCCC system, and not because it doubts the good intentions of current or past initiatives.
Way back in 2007, at COP 14 in Bali, REDD+ was agreed and hailed as the new pathway to prevent deforestation and forest degradation and save the world’s great primary tropical forests. Well… it hasn’t.
In 2014 the New York Declaration on Forests announced an ambitious programme to “cut natural forest loss in half by 2020 and strive to end it by 2030”. But the first 5-year review expressed deep dismay that the initiative had failed to curb loss and damage to Earth’s irreplaceable primary tropical rainforests and that the annual rate of global deforestation had increased by 43%.
And let’s not forget the 2018 Katowice declaration on “Forests for Climate” (what happened to that anyway?).
ECO wonders what’s really going on here… Does the UNFCCC remember how long ago civil society urged the adoption of forest definitions that differentiated between primary, secondary, natural, and plantation forests? It was 2008. To this day, the UNFCCC sees no difference between a primary forest, and a monoculture of trees.
And don’t even get ECO started on the current LULUCF accounting rules that don’t differentiate between the condition of ecosystems and incentivise the destruction of forests for bioenergy while being counted as zero emissions in the energy sector.
ECO also sees with increasing concern that many biodiversity and sustainable development goals could be severely compromised if certain unsustainable climate mitigation and land-based Carbon Dioxide Removal (CDR) measures are deployed at a very large scale in the name of reaching “net zero” by 2050.
ECO wonders why Parties have such a hard time understanding why these looming risks need to be dealt with in this Convention. That’s right, some STILL seem to question why the UNFCCC should have to deal with biodiversity issues when we have the CBD for that!
ECO will put it simply: biodiversity lowers the risk of ecosystems releasing gigantic amounts of GHGs into the atmosphere and supports the health and resilience of human societies at the forefront of climate impacts. Protecting and restoring biodiversity and ecosystem integrity is absolutely critical if we are to keep global warming to 1.5°C AND to adapt to the inevitable climate impacts we are already experiencing due to past inaction.
Nonetheless, protecting and restoring nature does not provide fossil fuels with a “get out of jail” free card: in order to keep 1.5ºC within reach, this must be done alongside and not instead of a rapid and urgent phase-out of fossil fuels.
Nature is a key part of the solution, but it can also become a HUGE part of the problem if Parties fail to acknowledge these crucial interlinkages. The UNFCCC must therefore understand true climate ambition as reaching the 1.5°C goal in a way that helps reverse, rather than accelerate, the 6th mass extinction and biodiversity crisis in the next decade.
So, how will all these good intentions and commitments be reflected in COP decisions? And what changes will be made to the way the UNFCCC treats forests and other natural ecosystems? ECO will be closely watching the formal outcomes of COP26 to find out if, finally, Parties start shifting from promises to real climate and biodiversity action.