As leaders, businesses, and human activity continue to fail the world’s forests on a catastrophic scale, a major new report published today by WWF sets out the first ever comprehensive global blueprint on how to bring our forests back to life.
Launching alongside the 2023 Forest Declaration Assessment, WWF’s new Forest Pathways Report comes just two years on from pledges made at COP26 by over 140 countries representing 90% of the world’s forests, to halt and reverse deforestation by 2030. Yet these new reports show the speed and intensity with which we are still destroying forests around the world and the lack of progress on commitments leaves us clearly in danger of missing vital targets.
Despite commitments from world leaders at COP26 to support trade policies that do not drive deforestation, new analysis in the report reveals that changing land use and decimating forests to supply the international trade in soy, palm oil, cocoa and coffee alone resulted in an estimated 392 million tonnes of CO2 emissions in 2021.
And since pledges at COP26 to significantly increase global finance for forest conservation and restoration, the report shows that globally we are now spending at least 100 times more public funding on environmentally harmful subsidies ($378 billion - $1trillion) than we are on finance for forests ($2.2bn).
Alongside this analysis, new figures from the Forest Declaration Assessment also published today reveal that in 2022 alone, global forest loss was 6.6 million hectares and tropical forest loss was 4.1 million hectares – an area the size of Denmark. Yet fewer forests mean a far more unstable world – with much less biodiversity and wildlife, less food and water security, less protection against extreme weather events, and more climate chaos.
Despite housing 80% of our terrestrial biodiversity, forests are being increasingly decimated for crops, and unsustainable agriculture is resulting in the declines of species that depend on forests such as gorillas, hornbills, orangutans, and black headed squirrel monkeys. Average populations of monitored forest species have declined by 79% in the last 50 years alone.
Posted On: 25/10/2023
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