Countries at the UN Climate Summit last week in New York committed to an ambitious plan to curtail deforestation. Signatories of The New York Declaration on Forests, including 30 countries and 30 corporations, pledged to cut deforestation in half by 2020 and bring the practice to an end by 2030.
“This broad support is really something good that has come from Climate Week,” said Peter Holmgren, director general of the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), in a blog post on the organization’s site. “It is not every year that we have heads of state gathered and you hear them speak about forests, agriculture and commitments.”
Although the countries and corporations represent a large swath of world regions and commercial markets, there was one “notable absence,” the CIFOR blog post said.
Brazil did not sign the document, despite the fact that it has stopped forest deforestation by 70 percent in the last decade, according to The Economist. Why? Because zero deforestation is counter to Brazilian law.
From the CIFOR blog:
“Brazil did not sign for diplomatic and, let’s say, legal restrictions, because it said ‘zero deforestation,’ and Brazilian law today allows for a certain small amount of deforestation,” said Carlos Nobre, the national secretary for research and development policy in Brazil’s Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation. “However, Brazil is intent to get to zero deforestation soon.”
Cutting global deforestation in half would have significant effects on the climate, according to CIFOR. Carbon emissions could be reduced by 4.5 billion to 8.8 billion tons per year, which the organization said is the equivalent of the United States’ yearly emissions.
Still, some experts are concerned that the declaration does not look at forests holistically.
“The declaration is a little bit short in that it focuses on forests as an entity and not on forests as an entity within the landscape,” Verchot said in the blog. “Agriculture, forestry and land use would have been a really nice declaration.”
