Deforestation and degradation – especially in the tropics – contribute to more annual CO2 emissions in the atmosphere than any human activity other than energy production and consumption. 

Deforestation also cripples our planet’s ability to filter carbon dioxide from our air. Destroying these carbon sinks threatens entire watersheds, endangered species and endangered cultures. According to the IPCC, “reducing deforestation and forest degradation rates represents one of the most effective and robust options for climate change mitigation.”

During a panel at the COP28 climate summit in Dubai, Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva and Finance Minister Fernando Haddad unveiled “Tropical Forests Forever,” which aims to raise $250 billion for efforts to protect and restore the world’s tropical forests. This proposal builds on the earlier work led by the World Bank, the Center for Global Development and the Rockefeller Foundation.

Environment ministers of the Group of 20 nations agreed Thursday to support the creation of funding sources for ecosystem services, acknowledging Brazil’s proposal to establish a trust fund for forest conservation.

Known as the Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), the Brazilian initiative would reward tropical forest countries for protecting the critical biomes. The environment ministers of leading rich and developing countries assembled this week in Rio de Janeiro for four-day meetings to discuss climate change and sustainability. The topic is one of Brazil’s priorities as it hosts the G20 presidency until the end of the year, with heads of state convening in Rio next month.

The TFFF would reward tropical forest countries for protecting the natural tropical forests that provide enormous development benefits and are a critical part of humanity’s effort to combat climate change. The funds, which would be raised from governments and the private sector, would go into an independently-managed fund which could be drawn upon by tropical countries that meet expectations for forest conservation and deforestation. Countries would see a reduction in the availability of funding if their deforestation rate increased.

By providing an explicit payment for conservation and restoration of tropical forests, the facility would help to address a significant market failure, placing a value to the ecosystem services that those forests render to water management, biodiversity preservation, soil protection, nutrient cycling, continental and global climate regulation, and climate resilience.

Correcting this market failure will also help reduce poverty and advance economic development, both in forest countries and globally. As this market failure has gone unaddressed, deforestation and degradation have proceeded unabated in many developing countries as a result of seemingly compelling economic incentives. 

Existing initiatives and programs have made progress, but they have not proven sufficient to overcome entrenched interests in the business-as-usual drivers of destruction, and reverse global trends in deforestation and degradation of forests. A new large incentive is needed to generate political will, support country ownership of conservation objectives, and draw attention of key decision makers, including heads of state and ministers of finance and planning, to address the governance changes needed.

The TFFF will offer a substantial, long-term reward for successfully tackling deforestation. It provides an additional incentive for forest nations to meet this challenge and to seek out and effectively utilize the international community’s existing mechanisms, without increasing funding demands on government budgets. The proposed facility seeks to establish financial transfers that do not rely on grant contributions strategically designed as conditional incentives for results-based efforts at halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation.

While the TFFF would provide a major incentive for forest nations to conserve and enhance these important resources, it is not intended to be the only solution. It would complement, not replace, other policies and initiatives necessary to achieve this key objective, including REDD+ program, development of effective carbon credit markets, and changes in agricultural policies and practices.

The TFFF proposal emerges amid a growing interest in nature-based solutions for addressing climate change and other environmental challenges. It also follows a significant decrease in Amazon deforestation after Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s re-election as President of Brazil.In the first ten months since Lula’s return to office, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has dropped by 50 percent compared to 2022.

“We need more economic incentives to expedite forest conservation,” said Gary Chandler, founder of Sacred Seedlings. “Economic incentives are driving deforestation and global warming, so we must fight fire with fire to defend ecosystems and the livability of our planet.”

During last year’s presidential campaign against incumbent Jair Bolsonaro, Lula committed to addressing rampant deforestation in the Earth’s largest rainforest. Since taking office, his administration has been working to rebuild the environmental policy framework dismantled under Bolsonaro while proposing new initiatives to protect forests. Lula has also advanced the idea of an alliance of tropical forest nations, including Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, to secure global support for conservation.

After unveiling the Tropical Forests Forever, Brazil continued on its tropical forests push at COP28 by announcing the Arc of Restoration program, which will allocate up to $205 million to restore 60,000 square km (23,160 square miles) of deforested and degraded forest land in the Amazon by 2030.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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Deforestation is one of the leading factors driving global warming, climate change and loss of biodiversity. Many people are risking their lives to defend our forests and our planet. It’s hard to believe that a simple campaign on social media can make a difference, but actor Leonardo DiCaprio fired a shot that echoed around the world.

Ebo Forest is one of the largest intact rainforests in Cameroon. The forest spans across about 500,000 acres. The forest is the ancestral home to the Banen people and vast biodiversity.

In 2020, the Cameroon government opened up 169,000 acres of forest to logging. Experts and advocates wrote the Cameroon government to highlight the precious animal and plant species threatened by the exploitation. DiCaprio jumped in and put social media to work.

“Cameroon’s Ebo Forest, and all of the incredible animals that live there, are in trouble. This includes forest elephants, gorillas, chimpanzees and so many others. Let’s help #SaveEboForest,” DiCaprio Tweeted.

Just three weeks later, the Cameroon prime minister’s office suspended plans to log Ebo Forest.

“DiCaprio was crucial in helping to stop the logging of the Ebo Forest,” said Dr. Martin Cheek, a senior researcher with the Royal Botanic Gardens of Kew, London. “We very much appreciated the support Leo gave us in campaigning to protect Ebo last year so it seemed fitting to honor him in this way, naming a species unique only to this forest, after him. Had the logging concession gone ahead, we would have likely lost this species to timber extraction and slash-and-burn agriculture that usually follows logging concessions.”

The Leo tree is scientifically known as Uvariopsis dicaprio. The tree is is new to the world of science. It’s a small and tropical, evergreen tree with glossy, yellow flowers growing from its trunk. The tree is extremely rare and critically endangered because the forest where it is found is unprotected. Logging, mining and agriculture threaten biodiversity in the region and beyond. Uvariopsis dicaprio is now a member of the ylang ylang family.

Several of the species new to science that were named in 2021 are already extinct, and many are threatened, by deforestation, changes to the use of land and climate change.

DiCaprio also has put his star power to work for forest conservation. For example, he has helped defend the embattled Gunung Leuser Ecosystem. His philanthropic foundation pledged $3.2 million to help protect the forest and its biodiversity. Located in northwestern Sumatra, Leuser is one of Southeast Asia’s last great tracts of intact rainforest. It’s the only ecosystem where rhino, tiger, elephant and orangutan coexist.

The Leonardo DiCaprio Foundation has given out more than $40 million since its inception in 1998. The foundation, now known as re:wild, has mostly supported environmental causes. In 2016, DiCaprio was recognized for his climate change advocacy at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland. Thousands of trees have been planted in his name in Mexico to offset his carbon footprint.

“Generosity is the key to our future,” DiCaprio said. “Currently, less than three percent of all philanthropic giving goes to defending our planet.”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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Madagascar is one of the most biodiverse places on earth. Unfortunately, deforestation threatens these unique ecosystems, while contributing to greenhouse gas emissions, global warming and climate change.

This unique island nation has lost more than 94 percent of its forests. Most of the deforestation has taken place in the last 50 years. Breaking that destructive momentum is vital to the nation and the world.

The Makira Forest is one of the largest remaining tropical rainforest areas in Madagascar. It is a tremendously valuable site for biodiversity conservation, carbon storage, and other critical ecosystem services. Conservation International, Madagascar government, and the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) are working together to save this critical forest. The alliance intends to reduce deforestation across Makira’s 350,000 hectares. In addition, the group is working to save what’s left of the Mantadia Corridor, to the south of Makira.

The $50 million agreement will help alleviate poverty among forest-dependent communities, while reducing carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation.

Madagascar’s Ministry of Finance and Ministry of Environment, Ecology and Forests signed a landmark agreement today with the World Bank’s Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF), unlocking up to $50 million for efforts to reduce carbon emissions from deforestation and forest degradation between 2020 and 2024. With this Emission Reductions Payment Agreement (ERPA) in place, Madagascar will be paid to avoid deforestation and reduce 10 million tons of carbon dioxide emissions from the country’s rainforest-rich eastern coast.

“Reducing emissions related to deforestation and forest degradation is a crucial part of Madagascar’s effort to fight climate change,” said Marie-Chantal Uwanyiligira, World Bank Country Manager for Madagascar. “The agreement signed today puts the country on track to achieve its ambitious climate targets while improving rural livelihoods. Madagascar is doing its part in the global fight against climate change, as we are in this together.”

“The Madagascar government is delighted this agreement has been signed. It will allow Madagascar to sustainably finance its current policy of restoring the island and the restoration of forest landscapes, while rewarding local actors and the territories that contribute to restoration efforts. The Ministry will ensure fairness in the redistribution of revenues and make it a tool in the fight against precariousness while reducing pressure on the island’s unique biodiversity,” said Baomiavotse Vahinala Raharinirina, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development.

Madagascar’s Emission Reductions Program is designed to increase agricultural productivity and reduce rural poverty while improving soil quality, conserving water resources, and protecting vital forests and biodiversity. The program area covers 10 percent of the country, stretching across almost 7 million hectares along the country’s eastern humid forest ecosystem. This region is home to more than half of Madagascar’s biodiversity-rich rainforests, which are threatened by agricultural expansion.

The program builds on the country’s integrated agriculture landscape approach that aims to address the direct and indirect causes of deforestation and degradation and protect important watersheds.

The program reinforces conservation and community forest management and builds on forest-friendly agroforestry value chains, such as vanilla.

Madagascar is the fifth country in Africa and the eleventh globally to reach such a milestone agreement with the FCPF. The total contract value of the 11 FCPF ERPAs is now in excess of $550 million. ERPAs are innovative instruments that incentivize sustainable land management at scale and help to connect countries with other sources of climate financing. The resources from the FCPF provide new opportunities to conserve and regenerate forest landscapes and biodiversity while simultaneously supporting sustainable economic growth, which is critical for Madagascar’s development going forward.

Madagascar is home to almost 28 million people. If the local ecosystems collapse, many people will be forced to migrate to mainland Africa, an area already bursting under the pressures of land degradation, climate change and population growth. Failure is not an option.

The Forest Carbon Partnership Facility (FCPF) is a global partnership of governments, businesses, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples’ organizations focused on reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, forest carbon stock conservation, the sustainable management of forests, and the enhancement of forest carbon stocks in developing countries, activities commonly referred to as REDD+. Launched in 2008, the FCPF has worked with 47 developing countries across Africa, Asia, and Latin America and the Caribbean, along with 17 donors that have made contributions and commitments totaling US$1.3 billion.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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The year 2020 didn’t have many bright spots in the world of rainforest conservation. Fortunately, a courageous woman in Ecuador was an inspirational exception.

In recognition of the struggle of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon, TIME magazine named Nemonte Nenquimo from Ecuador to this year’s TIME 100, its annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world. She also earned the prestigious Goldman Environmental Prize.

Nenquimo is a leader of the Waorani nation, legendary hunter-harvesters of the south-central Ecuadorian Amazon. There are only about 5,000 members of the Waorani nation spread across 54 communities and 2.5 million acres of some of the most threatened rainforest on the planet.

In 2019, she led her people’s historic legal victory against the Ecuadorian government, protecting half-a-million acres of primary rainforest from oil drilling, which established a legal precedent for Indigenous rights across the region.

After the Ecuadorian government announced the land auctions, Nenquimo assumed a leadership role and began organizing Waorani communities. She held regionwide assemblies and interviews with village leaders, helped her people launch a digital campaign targeting potential investors with the slogan “Our Rainforest is Not for Sale,” and spearheaded a petition to the oil industry and Ecuadorian government that was signed by 378,000 people from around the world.

At the same time, Nenquimo proactively helped communities maintain their independence from oil company handouts by installing rainwater harvesting systems and solar panels and supporting a woman-led organic cacao and chocolate production business. She played a key role in a community mapping project that charted more than 500,000 acres of Waorani territory, encompassing 16 communities.

Nenquimo also secured training for Waorani youth to be filmmakers and document their work, publishing powerful images and videos for the campaign, including aerial drone footage of the rainforest and Waorani territory. Ultimately, Nenquimo helped bring the Waorani case to the courts and served as the lead plaintiff in a lawsuit against the Ecuadorian government for violating the Waorani’s right to Free, Prior, and Informed Consent.

“The court recognized that the government violated our right to live free, and make our own decisions about our territory and self determination,” Nenquimo said. “Our territory is our decision, and now, since we are owners, we are not going to let oil enter and destroy our natural surroundings and kill our culture.”

Indigenous people often suffer violence at the hands of those who attempt to take their land. They are often forced to leave their territories due to pressure from large corporations with global influence.

Just days before the Waorani victory, a coalition of Latin-American journalists unveiled a new reporting project, “Tierra de Resistentes,” which exposed the dangers that face environmental activists. The report showed that advocates from ethnic minorities—particularly indigenous people—face a high risk of violent attack from supporters of mining, logging, and other industries. The project, which is supported by Deutsche Welle Akademie, the Pulitzer Center, and others explains that defending the jungles, mountains, forests and rivers of Latin America has never been this dangerous. One aspect of the project is a database, compiled by thirty journalists, from Bolivia, Brazil, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Mexico, and Guatemala, which documents more than thirteen hundred attacks on environmentalists that took place in these seven countries over the past decade.

According to a recently published Global Witness report, Latin America accounted for more than half of the environmental defenders killed around the world in 2018. Titled “Enemies of the State?” the report revealed that 83 of the 164 environmental defenders killed last year were from Latin America.

“Ever since we began documenting the murders of environmental defenders in Latin America, it has always been the most dangerous region,” says Ben Leather, a campaigner from Global Witness.

The 2018 report marks the first time Global Witness has documented the use and abuse of the laws and policies designed to criminalize and intimidate environmental defenders, their families and the communities they represent. According to the report, the criminalization of environmental defenders “can be used to tarnish reputations, choke off funding, and lock activists into costly legal battles that stop them from carrying out their work.” It also “reduces the possibility that activists will continue their activism” in the future.

Ecuador is not immune to the violence against environmental activists. In 2014, an indigenous leader who was found bound and buried, days before he planned to take his campaign to climate talks in Lima. The victim, José Isidro Tendetza Antún, a former vice-president of the Shuar Federation of Zamora, was last seen on his way to a meeting of protesters against the Mirador copper and gold mine. Tendetza had been a prominent critic of Mirador, an open pit that has been approved in an area of important biodiversity that is also home to the Shuar, Ecuador’s second-biggest indigenous group.

The project is operated by Ecuacorriente – originally a Canadian-owned firm that was brought by a Chinese conglomerate, CCRC-Tongguan Investment, in 2010. According to the Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador, the project will devastate around 450,000 acres of forest. Suffice it to say, Antún likely died trying to save that sacred forest.

Despite numerous threats to her tribe and herself, Nenquimo keeps fighting for the future. She grew up in the traditional community of Nemonpare in the Pastaza region of the Ecuadorian Amazon. She co-founded the Indigenous-led nonprofit organization Ceibo Alliance in 2015 to protect Indigenous lands and livelihoods from resource extraction (mining, timber and land-grabbing). She was elected the first female president of CONCONAWEP, the Waorani organization of Pastaza province, in 2018.

“The TIME 100 recognition is for our ancestors, our elders, and all Indigenous peoples fighting to protect the Amazon,” said Nenquimo. “The fires, pandemic, and accelerating climate change are a stark reminder that our world is out of balance. Along with my indigenous sisters and brothers, we hope TIME’s recognition will inspire people from all nations and countries to stand with us in demanding respect for Indigenous rights and to listen to Indigenous knowledge and solutions. Now is the time to unite to protect the Amazon, our planet, and climate for future generations.”

Nenquimo is the only Indigenous woman featured on the 2020 TIME list and among the first Amazonians to ever receive the accolade. Leonardo DiCaprio, an avid supporter of Indigenous rights and Amazon protection, introduced Nenquimo to TIME’s readers.

“Last year, the Amazon was better known for acres ablaze than for acres saved,” said DiCaprio. “But the lawsuit that Nemonte Nenquimo, president of the Waorani of Pastaza and a co-founder of the Ceibo Alliance, brought forth was a rare bright spot. The landmark ruling protects the Waorani’s ancestral home in Ecuador from immediate destruction. The ripples have brought hope to Indigenous communities everywhere, all too often facing overwhelming odds of their own.

Nemonte lives her fight, and to have a conversation with her is to witness a rare clarity of purpose. I remember she once told me that she wasn’t going to give up. That she was going to keep fighting. That she would continue to defend the forest that she loves from the industries and the oil companies that would devour it. She has kept her word, and continues to be a voice and advocate for her community. Nemonte’s cause is everyone’s cause. She inspires those she speaks with to shoulder the nearest boulder and walk alongside her as her movement continues to grow. I am lucky to have met her, and I am luckier still to have learned from her.”

“Throughout the Amazon, our indigenous territories and cultures are being gravely threatened by governments, extractive industries, and invaders. The recognition from TIME proves that our struggle is being heard. Western civilization is waking up to the need to listen to and respect Indigenous peoples. As indigenous peoples, we are connected with our origins, and with the spirits of our territories. We are defending Mother Earth with our courage, our knowledge, and our lives. It is time for governments and companies to listen to us and respect us,” said a Waorani statement about the honor.

The Waorani people’s resistance continues to inspire frontline Indigenous communities across the Amazon and beyond as a powerful example of Indigenous-led action against fossil fuel extraction. Nenquimo was instrumental in developing her people’s multi-faceted campaign, which ultimately defeated the Ecuadorian government in court and galvanized Indigenous resistance to the auctioning of Indigenous territories to foreign oil companies.

The Waorani people’s struggle emerged as a flashpoint in the South American country, highlighting the growing conflict between the Ecuadorian government’s thirst for oil revenues to relieve international debt and indigenous peoples’ internationally recognized rights to free, prior and informed consent, self-determination, territory and the rights of nature, which have been recognized by the Ecuadorian constitution since 2008.

Nenquimo is only the second Ecuadorian to be named to the TIME100 list, which recognizes the activism, innovation, and achievement of the world¹s most influential individuals and is now in its seventeenth year. Nenquimo’s recognition comes as Ecuador grapples with a severe coronavirus outbreak in rainforest territories and struggles to revive its fragile debt-ridden economy – crises that compound existing threats to Indigenous peoples’ survival.

Since the onset of the pandemic, Nenquimo has organized independent medical brigades and other relief to Waorani communities infected by the coronavirus, as well as united with other Indigenous nations to demand a moratorium on all resource extraction in the Amazon during the pandemic.

“The recognition of Waorani leader Nemonte Nenquimo as a TIME100 Honoree shines a light on the collective struggles of Indigenous peoples who are putting their bodies on the line to fight against the most pressing threats facing the Amazon and our climate. This honor also serves to highlight the solutions and resilience of Indigenous peoples amid multiple crises,” said Mitch Anderson, Executive Director & Founder of Amazon Frontlines.

The Waorani will return to the courtroom this fall, before Ecuador’s Supreme Court, as their precedent-setting legal case has been selected to set national level jurisprudence on Indigenous Rights, with specific regard to the right to free, prior, and informed consent. The process comes amid intensifying extraction across the Amazon and contentious debate over Indigenous peoples’ right to veto projects affecting their territories.

“As Indigenous peoples, we have demonstrated our critical role in the protection of the balance of life and our planet, and we have won the first battle against the pandemic. But our fight against the tougher pandemic of extractivism threatening our territories and our survival continues,” declared José Gregorio Diaz Mirabal from COICA, the coordinating body of Indigenous organizations across the nine-countries that comprise the Amazon basin.

The Waorani, who currently number around 2,000, once had one of the largest territories of all indigenous Amazonians in Ecuador, within the modern provinces of Orellana, Napo, and Pastaza. They traditionally lived as nomadic hunter-gatherers in small clan settlements. Missionary groups relocated many Waorani families into larger communities with the purpose of converting them to Christianity.

The Waorani are the most recently contacted of all Ecuadorian indigenous peoples, first reached by an American missionary group in 1958. Since first contact, the Waorani have experienced a rapid and difficult insertion into modern society. Their territories have been greatly reduced, and their remaining lands impacted by logging, oil extraction, and colonist settlement, among other issues. Several Waorani groups have thus far rejected contact and continue to move ever deeper into the forest.

To the Waorani people, the connection and communication among all living things is a fundamental belief. The relationships between trees and other forms of life are reflected in the Waorani language.

In Waorani, things are described not only by their general type, but also by the other beings surrounding them. So, for example, any one ceibo tree isn’t a “ceibo tree” but is “the ivy-wrapped ceibo,” and another is “the mossy ceibo with black mushrooms.” In fact, anthropologists trying to classify and translate Waorani words into English struggle because, Haskell writes, “when pressed by interviewers, Waorani ‘could not bring themselves’ to give individual names for what Westerners call ‘tree species’ without describing ecological context such as the composition of the surrounding vegetation.”

Because they relate to the trees as live beings with intimate ties to surrounding people and other creatures, the Waorani aren’t alarmed by the notion that a tree might scream when cut, or surprised that harming a tree should cause trouble for humans.

“I received this year’s Goldman Environmental Prize because of my people’s collective fight to protect what we love: our way of life, songs, rivers, forests, the animals, life on Earth,” said Nenquimo. “Together, with our allies at Amazon Frontlines and the Ceibo Alliance, my people were able to stop the sale of hundreds of thousands of acres of our forest homeland to the international oil industry. By combining our ancestral knowledge with new technologies, we were able to create digital maps of our rainforest that showed the world—and the governments and the oil companies—the immeasurable spiritual, ecological, and cultural value of our rainforest territory. 

Through community-organizing and innovative legal strategies, we were able to confront head-on some of the mightiest interests in the world and win a legal victory that not only protects a half-million acres of our forest homeland from oil drilling, but also sets a precedent for other indigenous nations to protect millions more. My hope is that our story of resistance inspires other movements across the Amazon and around the world to imagine a different path for ourselves. We can’t afford to let our imagination fail us now. There is too much at stake.

Governments and industry can’t see beyond the hole that they are digging. Despite the climate crisis and the global pandemic, in the Amazon we see governments planning to intensify fossil fuel extraction and large-scale mining operations. This destruction will lead to an ever-deepening crisis that our children will have to shoulder. We need to transform the way we live on planet Earth. We must be rebellious and creative, loving and kind—and more than anything, humble enough to confront some liberating truths: rivers are alive; butterflies have their own perspectives; plants have their own purpose; and we, humans, are not at the center of things, nor do we stand apart from nature. We are the rivers, the butterflies, and the plants. We are nature. Indigenous peoples know this.

Our spirituality is based on our interconnectedness with all beings, and on the deepest principle of respect: reciprocity. That is why to this day, despite centuries of displacement and violence against our peoples, we are the protectors of 80 percent of our planet’s biodiversity. We are only 5 percent of the world’s population, yet in our territories, we’ve kept our Earth’s ecosystems alive and flourishing. But the world is getting smaller, societies are moving faster, and the threats to our planet are growing greater day by day. My elders sing about how they defended our territory with spears and patrolled the forests with the stealth and stamina of the jaguar. But, today, spears are not enough. And so, I’m writing to you now from my home in Ecuador’s Amazon to ask you to join us at www.AmazonFrontlines.org and help us build a movement with the power to protect our forests, our cultures, and our songs—and transform the way we all, collectively, live on this Earth.”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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In a letter to the Cameroonian government, more than 60 conservationists and researchers asked the government to suspend plans to create two long-term logging concessions in Ebo Forest—one of the last remaining intact forests in the region—and instead to engage all stakeholders, including the local communities living around the forest, to develop an inclusive land-use plan.

The letter was delivered to Prime Minister Joseph Ngute’s office April 28. Scientists, including members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Species Survival Commission’s Primate Specialist Group, wrote that there may be sustainable development options that could benefit communities, the forest and generate revenue for the country.

The 1,500 square-kilometer forest in Cameroon’s Littoral region is the most biologically diverse area in the Gulf of Guinea. Ebo Forest makes up one half of a Key Biodiversity Area, making it a site of global importance to the planet’s overall health and the persistence of biodiversity. It holds an estimated 35 million tons of carbon and is home to many rare and endangered species, including forest elephants and grey parrots.

Ebo Forest is also the ancestral home of the more than 40 communities living around it, all of whom would be heavily affected by any development of the forest.

“The people living in the communities here live with the forest and by the forest,” said Bethan Morgan, head of the Central Africa Program at San Diego Zoo Global and long-time researcher in Ebo Forest. “Everything about the health of the forest is reflected in the health of the communities. That makes it especially important to include them in any discussions about developing the forest.”

Ebo Forest has been a hotspot for conservation research and discovery during the past 20 years. In 2005, researchers discovered that the tool-wielding Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees in Ebo are culturally distinct from other chimpanzees in Africa. They are the only chimpanzees in the world who both crack nuts and fish for termites. And numbering 700, this population is one of the largest populations of endangered Nigeria-Cameroon chimpanzees.

In addition, there is a small population of gorillas in Ebo Forest, and that population may actually be a new subspecies. The gorillas live about 200 kilometers away from any other groups of western lowland or Cross River gorillas. Ebo is also home to one of only two remaining populations of Preuss’s red colobus, a critically endangered monkey, as well as one of the largest remaining populations of endangered drills.

The plants in Ebo are as unique as its charismatic megafauna. At least 12 species of plants discovered within it cannot be found anywhere else on the planet.

“Because of its biological richness, Ebo is an incredibly special place for researchers,” said Barthélemy Tchiengue, a Cameroonian botanist from the National Herbarium of Cameroon. “And this great reservoir of biodiversity has not yet revealed all its treasure.”

Ebo Forest is deeply culturally significant to the communities living around it. They depend on it for food and traditional medicines, and they consider Ebo Forest to be their customary land. Before Cameroon’s independence in 1960, many communities lived in the forest and their patriarchs and matriarchs have close relatives buried there. The traditional chiefs of the communities are legally recognized by the Cameroonian government and they have worked closely with the government in efforts to protect Ebo Forest in the past.

Cameroon’s Minister of Forestry signed two orders Feb. 4 proposing the classification of two forest management units for timber extraction. The units combined total 1,296 square-kilometers, nearly the entirety of Ebo Forest. This would destroy the entire gorilla habitat, level the western part of the forest where chimpanzees crack nuts, and could destroy food sources for animals with specific diets, like Preuss’s red colobus.

The orders were posted publicly March 9, and they signal a shift in the government’s intentions for Ebo. It took initial steps to establish the forest as a national park in 2006, but the process stalled in 2011.

“Ebo Forest is a phenomenal place,” said Dirck Byler, great ape conservation director at Global Wildlife Conservation and vice chair of the Section on Great Apes of the IUCN SSC Primate Specialist Group. “We were hoping by now it would be a national park, but there are other ways to protect the primates living in it while simultaneously helping the communities around it.”

In their letter to the prime minister, scientists and researchers urged the government to consider sustainable alternatives to logging. They propose using the methodology currently being developed by Cameroon’s Ministry of Economy, Planning and Regional Development (MINEPAT) to guide an inclusive and transparent land-use planning process with local communities and other stakeholders. They wrote that the process could include financial and technical support from the government and multinational partners to build consensus on options for sustainable use.

Scientists specifically suggest in their letter that moving forward with sustainable land-use activities could generate revenue for the country and support the socio-economic livelihoods of Ebo’s nearby communities. It would also signal to Cameroon’s international partners during this critical year for biodiversity that the government intends to honor its commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The government may also be able to sell certifiable carbon credits on the carbon market.

“The government of Cameroon has a great opportunity now to support both its human and non-human primates by protecting the forest in a way that aligns with local communities, the wildlife that lives there, and Cameroon’s international agreements,” said Russ Mittermeier, chief conservation officer at Global Wildlife Conservation and chair of the IUCN Species Survival Commission Primate Specialist Group. “We are looking forward to continuing to learn about the natural and cultural heritage of Ebo Forest with the Cameroonian government leading the way.”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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By Laurel Wamsley, NPR

Each winter, millions of monarch butterflies make their home at the El Rosario forest reserve in Mexico — one of the best places in the world to see them. Local guides lead tourists up the mountainside on foot and horseback to where the monarchs cluster in fir and pine trees. Their bright orange wings flit amid the mild weather of Michoacán, and signs ask for silence as visitors enter the nesting areas.

This week, the sanctuary is in mourning for two of its protectors.

Two men connected to the butterfly reserve have been found dead in the span of a week, showing the danger that conservationists sometimes face in a country where protecting the environment can mean encountering hostility and violence from gangs and business interests.

The body of environmental activist Homero Gómez González was found last week, two weeks after he had gone missing. His body was recovered at the bottom of a holding pond in an agricultural area.

Prosecutors in Michoacán say an autopsy found that the cause of death was “mechanical asphyxiation by drowning of a person with head trauma.” It does not appear to have been a robbery: Gómez was found with nearly 10,000 pesos on him (more than $500).

On Saturday, prosecutors said they’ve opened an investigation after a second man reported missing was found dead: Raúl Hernández Romero, who had worked as a tour guide in the preserve. His wife reported that he’d gone missing last Monday. His body was found bruised, his head showing trauma from a sharp object. Authorities have not said whether the deaths are connected.

The El Rosario sanctuary is part of the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve, which was enshrined as a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2008, calling the overwintering concentration of butterflies there “a superlative natural phenomenon.” It noted that more than half of overwintering colonies of the monarch butterfly’s eastern population are found in these specific areas of Mexico.

But the same forests that draw butterflies to migrate thousands of miles each winter are under threat from illegal logging and clandestine avocado farms.

Gómez González was one of the butterflies’ strongest advocates. A former local commissioner, he was among the leaders who argued that tourism was a more reliable economic strategy for the rural community than logging, The Associated Press reports. He went on to become manager of the El Rosario sanctuary, fighting illegal logging and advocating for the replanting of trees that provide the monarchs’ habitat.

UNESCO leaders expressed “deep sadness and profound concern” at his death, offering condolences to his family and those who “sometimes at the risk of their lives, work every day to protect this natural heritage which is shared by all of humanity.”

Hundreds of farm workers gathered for Gómez González’s funeral on Friday, news outlets reported.

“Many people are outraged,” Gómez González’s wife, Rebeca Valencia, told the Mexican newspaper El País. “He was an ecologist at heart. He never told me about threats.”

She asks how this could happen to someone whose work was to protect life. “I can’t process it,” she told the newspaper.

“He fought for his town, and that fills me with pride,” said 19-year-old son, Homero Gómez Valencia, who told the AP that butterflies were just one of his father’s causes. He recounted how his father had once led farmers in taking over the state capitol to demand aid. “A lot of the things we have are due to that struggle, which took many years. He fought against a thousand things.”

Poet and environmental activist Homero Aridjis knew Gómez González for years. He told NPR’s Carrie Kahn that without activists, Mexico’s wildlife won’t survive.

“How can you protect the forests and the butterflies if Homero Gomez or other people are not protected?”

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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Ecosystems around the world are on the verge of collapse. It is a planetary emergency. Humanity has already wiped out 83 percent of wild mammals and half of all plants and severely altered three-quarters of ice-free land and two-thirds of marine environments. One million species are at risk of extinction in the coming decades – a rate tens to hundreds of times higher than the average over the past 10 million years.

The World Economic Forum’s 2020 Global Risks Report ranks biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as one of the top five threats humanity will face in the next ten years. Human societies and economies rely on biodiversity in fundamental ways. Our research shows that $44 trillion of economic value generation – over half the world’s total GDP – is moderately or highly dependent on nature and its services.

Nature loss matters for most businesses – through impacts on operations, supply chains, and markets.

We have the power to change this. Humanity urgently needs to rethink its relationship with nature, in order to halt and reverse the alarming degradation of the natural world. Business leaders have a crucial role to play, by putting nature at the core of their processes and decision-making and systematically identifying, assessing, mitigating and disclosing nature-related risks to avoid severe consequences.

Businesses can be part of the global movement to protect and restore nature.

Despite an increasing focus on nature loss, there is still a limited understanding of why it matters to businesses and what the private sector can practically do about it. The World Economic Forum is launching a series of New Nature Economy (NNE) reports in 2020, making the business and economic case for safeguarding nature. The series aims to catalyse public-private momentum in 2020, with a focus on the UN Convention on Biological Diversity’s milestone summit (COP15) in Kunming, China, and the related Business for Nature mobilization.

Nature Risk Rising, the first report in the NNE series, explains how nature-related risks matter to business, why they must be urgently mainstreamed into risk management strategies and why it is vital to prioritize the protection of nature’s assets and services within the broader global economic growth agenda.

The 15th edition of the World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report is published as critical risks are manifesting. The global economy is facing an increased risk of stagnation, climate change is striking harder and more rapidly than expected, and fragmented cyberspace threatens the full potential of next-generation technologies — all while citizens worldwide protest political and economic conditions and voice concerns about systems that exacerbate inequality.

The challenges before us demand immediate collective action, but fractures within the global community appear to only be widening. Stakeholders need to act quickly and with purpose within an unsettled global landscape.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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By David Gilbert, Food First

One January morning in the middle of Indonesia’s rainy season, I joined a few friends for an eight hour drive across the center of Sumatra to Krui, an expanse of forest farms in the foothills of the Bukit Barisan mountains. I wanted to learn more about how the agriculturalists living there cultivate their forest farms—human planted stands of valuable tree crops planted in a way that resembles a forest.

Over the years Krui’s agriculturalists have gained attention for avoiding industrial development and degradation of the land and biodiversity. Krui’s forest farms are a form of agroecological farming that supports local watersheds, biodiversity, and global climate cycles. I figure I should see Krui for myself, and wonder what is going with the forest farms now, since the last reports about them were written a decade ago.

We spend the first hours of our long day in the car in Sumatra’s coastal plain, watching green lines of oil palms pan across the car windows. Heading east, the one-lane highway climbs up into the foothills, leaving the oil palm plantations behind. Nearing Krui a caravan of four-wheel drive SUVs with tinted windows passes us, heading back out for the nearby gritty port city Lampung. One of my buddies turns to me, “See? Krui’s forests go into the sawmills and the SUVs come out.”

The comment is this activist’s way of telling me that the pressures are strong here in Krui for agriculturalists to sell their land and their remarkable Krui working forests that grow on it.

Palm oil plantation developers and timber merchants will pay cash for both the land and the timber.

It seems every few minutes a few more fancy SUVs pass us heading back to the big city, or overtake us at speed as they head to Krui. Their velocity belies their urgency. These are free-wheeling men in search of profits. And many of them, the owners and traders that buzz around the plantations and sawmills, have become rich buying up the Krui agriculturalists’ trees for timber and the land for still more oil palm plantations.

We make the busy sea-side town of Krui to meet up with a forest-farmer that will be hosting us for a few days further up into the hills. Rather than get out and talk in the busy town, where word of visitors talking ecology spreads like forest fire, the forest-farmer piles into our slow truck. Within a minute of getting in the cab with us, the fifty-five year old man dressed in a t-shirt and plastic flip-flops, who has cultivated Krui’s diverse agricultural forests his entire life, told me, “The price of damar is too low, and has been for too long. So people are cutting the trees for timber.”

The damar the forest-farmer is referring to is a local rainforest tree that produces a crystalline yellow resin, called ‘cat eye’, that commands an international market for a handful of uses from incense to feedstock for high-end cosmetics, paints, and varnishes. Krui’s forest farmers have planted damar in these agroforests, along with fruit trees like durian, jackfruit, and mangosteen. And between these trees are still more timber species, along with plants and palms that produce vegetables, fiber, and medicine.

Forming a closed canopy more than one hundred feet up, and supporting a breathtaking biodiversity, visitors often make the mistake of thinking they are walking through an ancient rainforest when they visit these planted forests. But these forests are cultivated, starting first around the end of the nineteenth century in response to rising global demand for the damar resin.

By the early 1990s the Krui agroforests spread to about 75,000 hectares, the size of nearly two hundred fifty Central Parks in New York City. They are all the more remarkable for having taken form during the same time as the relentless expansion of industrial farming for rubber and palm oil across Sumatra.

With their agroforests and rejection of oil palms, Krui joins the rising chorus of oil palm protest and dissent that has for generations been commonplace in Indonesia’s countryside.

Krui’s forests are bustling, working forests. Walking along a well-worn dirt track through the agroforests I greet women and men carrying baskets of fruit, returning to their homes for an early lunch. A few men scale their damar trees with a rattan rope-belt to fasten themselves to the tree trunks, as they use a special-made adze to score the tree’s bark and coax out more resin for harvesting along each tree’s length. I stop to watch and chat with a young forest farmer. Reflecting on how the damar forests seem to be shrinking around him, the man tells me, “The government takes advantage of a difficult circumstance to take profits from timber.” The man’s feeling of being ‘taken advantage of’ reflects the complex forces Krui’s forest farmers perceive to be squeezing them, pushing them to sell their agroforests for fast cash.

A few minutes later, ensconced in the agroforests that spread across the low foothills of this part of Bukit Barisan range, I hear the metallic whine of unseen chainsaws in the distance, signaling the disappearance of another damar agroforest.

Whether the Krui forests will remain standing is a question we should be concerned about because Krui is a place where people do not only see the land as a resource to be exploited, or plants as commodities to be produced. It is place for forest-farmers to nurture their own livelihoods and well-being, along with the well-being of the Sumatran tigers, the gibbons and siamangs, hornbills, and all of the life, including the human, that benefits from the Krui agroforests.

And while Krui’s forests are a form of agriculture, they are a very different way of producing food and other tree crops than industrial agriculture, with its all too often exploited laborers, toxic chemicals, fossil fuels, and giant plantations—biodiversity deserts—of only a single commodity crop. Whats more, over the last long one hundred years of colonial and now neoliberal industrial plantations in Sumatra, the countryside has become a highly monitored, policed, and militarized place, where armed authorities enforce agro-industry’s discipline on its workers.

Krui is an economy different than industrial farming. Krui’s vibrant agroforests have avoided being subsumed by the powerful actors of industrialization: the state, agribusiness, and timber corporations.

During Indonesia’s cruel military dictatorship, in the mid 1990s, the importance of their forest motivated Krui forest-farmers to build a coalition with activists, researchers, and government to turn back state and agribusiness plans to destroy Krui and develop two sprawling oil palm plantations in the forests’ stead. Even as one of the plantations was built, destroying a part of the southern Krui forests, the coalition, called TIM-Krui, blocked the plans for a second palm oil plantation.

Not content with this achievement, TIM-Krui mapped, wrote research reports, and protested in the streets for an unprecedented government policy that would protect Krui from any new industrial plantations. With the national government’s Krui Declaration in 1998 the coalition got their ruling. In the process TIM-Krui sent a message to other agriculturalists: turning back the industrial agriculture industry is possible.

The Krui forests’ own history shows us that agroforests are a politically activating form of agriculture, where dynamic, economically productive, and healthy ecosystems have taken root. Growing more like forests than farms, they are a much needed way of working and living on the land that is different from the way we often understand nature.

In fact, the Krui forests offer evidence for the argument that smallholder farmers should be allowed to live on and cultivate the land, not agribusiness and it’s industrial logging and plantation monocultures of timber, oil palm, and rubber in Indonesia, or corn and cotton in the USA.

Even so, over time, after the first palm oil plantation opened in the south of the Krui forests in 1994, the agroforests have fallen. Oil palms grow. Late modern capitalism is complex, and the pressures against Krui’s forests insidious. My own analysis of forest change data derived from satellite photography shows that about fifteen percent of Krui’s forests standing in 1997 have now been cut down. 

Oil palm, used to manufacture packaged foods, cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and, increasingly, biofuels, was the cause of the greatest amount of deforestation (more than one half of the total agroforest loss). Deforestation for timber, farmers’ new plots of coffee, clove, and mixed annuals like tobacco and vegetables made up the rest of the loss of Krui forests. And Krui’s forest-farmers and environmentalists today tend to think more of the Krui forests will fall in the future.

The protracted industrial shift in the Sumatran economy has brought an accordant change in distribution of the profits of the Krui agricultural forests. When once they were a resource for forest-farmers, since the 1990s they are increasingly commoditized for timber, land, and profits for the capitalists. It may be possible to alleviate the inequality already inscribed into the landscape from these changes, but the death of the millions of lifeforms that came with the cutting and clearing of these humid, rain soaked, and sunny hill forests is final.

Only in the last fifteen years has Krui timber been commoditized. Responding to influential traders’ demand for timber, the local government issued permits for the sawmills in return for a licensing fee. For the government, it is a source of income that the agroforests do not provide when standing, because the damar resin trade is virtually untaxed at the local level. Legally, these sawmills are to only purchase damar that has fallen naturally, and not cut, but operators do not ask questions. They simply pay 100-200 USD per cubic meter of damar timber.

Many forest-farmers told me they didn’t want to cut down their forests. It was just that ecological and economic factors aligned against the Krui forests. El Niño droughts hit the Krui forests hard over the last two decades, reducing crop yields. And then the local government began issuing those licensing permits to timber mills in Krui.

For the first time, when Krui forest farmers needed cash, for hospital bills or college tuition payments for their children, they could cut their forests and sell the timber into the sawmills for cash. Rather than replant them in damar agroforests though, this time many agriculturalists thought they would try their hand at planting coffee, cloves, or, increasingly, oil palm, or perhaps sell their land outright to the palm oil company or one of the land brokers that operate at the margins of the plantation estates. It was what many Krui farmers call ‘short term thinking.’ Cash poor, selling forests and land becomes the best immediate option for forest-farmers in downward spirals.

A typical Krui forest farmer has rights to hundreds of mature damar trees, each one typically worth one hundred fifty US dollars. Cashing out an entire agroforest can yield tens of thousands of dollars, a sum equivalent to many years of agroforest income. But over the long-term, a forest farmer can earn three or four hundred dollars a year from their damar agroforest. The full value of the standing agroforest is much larger than its value as timber, but a standing agroforest will never provide such a large amount of capital in one pulse.

There are signs that the decision to cut down the Krui agroforests can lead agriculturalists into problematic positions. The first oil palm plantations in the south of Krui went in more than fifteen years ago, when the Eraska Agro Karya Utama plantation began operating its crude palm oil mill. A few years later, men from families who sold their agroforest land to the oil palm plantation have been turning up in the remaining agroforests to the north asking for wage labor. As an elected village representative in one of Krui’s communities told me,

To the south, their land was not safe. It went to oil palm. The people were left unaware. They were told about the smallholder [palm oil] schemes, but they never got benefits from them. They will never got the rights to their land back. Now they come here looking for work… It has not even been ten years and they have already used up all the money they got, and they are out looking for work. We saw that and said no way to the oil palm company.

The lived experiences of those forest-farmers, those who were unfortunate enough to have to face the industrial plantations and agribusiness head-on, now send a valuable signal to those who still have their agroforests: the damar forests are a rich resource, one that oil palm cannot replace. In these farmers’ view, oil palm monocultures can not sustain rural workers’ needs into the long term.

Another forest-farmer explains to me what he has learned about how damar and oil palm compare: “Damar trees are productive for hundreds of years. It is not heavy labor, like construction wage work or oil palm. And unlike oil palm damar does not need to be cut and replanted in twenty years. And now the oil palm price is so low.” The comment underscores Krui forest farmers’ point that their agricultural system is superior over time, as as compared to oil palm.

Hearing I had come to Krui interested in the fate of the forests, one evening a number of members of an old, defunct damar association joined me in discussion. Many of these men and women emphasized their feeling that the damar agroforests would continue to stand if they could bypass local damar traders and sell the resin directly to international buyers. Their voices mixed with interjections:

We are so worried about the damar. The moment the damar leaves the tree it becomes money. But the profiteers, they alone play with the price, we should get a higher price. We are monopolized.”

The last comment, about being in a position of monopsonistic commodity relations, where forest-farmers only have access to one damar resin buyer, speaks directly to the political-economic aspects of the capitalist squeeze. With only a handful of traders commanding the local market, damar agriculturalists become price takers.

As the agroforests have fallen, the coalitions built to protect the agroforests and the long-term economic welfare of the forest-farmers have disintegrated. It is not that the coalitions and cooperatives were not useful—far from it. Krui forest-farmers have stopped participating in these organizations only because they realized they could not solve their fundamental problem: while the forest-farmers produce a still-valuable commodity, they remain at the lowest rung of a highly unequal commodity-chain. Yet if a coalition was able to counter the dominating power of the New Order and its plan to establish an oil palm plantation, certainly a rebuilt coalition could counter the powers of a handful commodity traders.

Krui forest-farmers do not have to cut down their forests, if they have a better way to sell their forest crops. But for now they do not have effective cooperatives, or enough market access directly to buyers, to profit from their damar forests. Indonesia’s capitalist political economy is squeezing them from below, with unequal economic relationships within communities and smallholders’ poor market position, and from above, with government and agribusiness’ economic influence and control over ever-larger amounts of land around Krui.

That Krui forest farmers turned back an oil palm plantation before gives reason to believe they could weaken this capitalist squeeze, by motivating a coalition to create producer and trade cooperatives, and forest-farmer savings and loan organizations to help them avoid turning to the cash held in their trees as timber value.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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The US green economy is estimated to generate over $1.3 trillion in revenue per year, representing 16.5 percent of the global green economy, according to a new study by UCL.

The green economy—broadly defined as an economy that is low carbon, resource efficient and socially inclusive—is a major source of jobs in the US, employing an estimated 9.5 million people.

The study, published in Palgrave Communications, finds that the size of the green economy and employment in the US grew by 20 percent between 2013 and 2016. This represents an additional 1.5 million jobs in the green economy; while over the same period, according to Department of Energy data, the coal industry saw a decline of 37,000 jobs.

Despite recent employment declines in the coal industry and scientists warning that we have 11 years left to prevent irreversible damage caused by the climate change emergency, the ‘America First Energy Policy’, put forward by Donald Trump as a candidate, proposed that 400,000 jobs could be created in the fossil fuel sector over the next 30 years.

Professor Mark Maslin (UCL Geography), co-author of the study, said: “The green economy is of huge importance to the US both in terms of economic growth and employment. Further investment in the fossil fuel industry is incompatible with economic trends, and could end up damaging the US economy as other countries invest more heavily in their green economy.”

A study by the UK Energy Research Centre (UKERC) suggests that renewable energy and energy efficiency create up to ten times more jobs per unit of electricity generated or saved than fossil fuels.

“Given the climate change emergency and the employment slump in fossil fuel industry, it only makes sense that future investment should focus on growth in the green sector.”

The green economy is critical for achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement on climate change and is considered to be one of the important tools available for achieving the UN’s Sustainable Development Goals.

To report on the green economy, the researchers used estimates of sales revenue and employment across 24 economic sub-sectors covering renewable energy, environmental protection, and low carbon goods and services.

Using this definition and including the relevant supply chain activity, the study suggests that revenue in the global green economy was at least $7.87 trillion in 2015/16.

Recently, a FTSE Russell report revealed that over the last five years, globally green companies generated higher returns than the stock market average.

In comparison to China, OECD nations and the G20 countries, the US has an above-average share of the working age population employed (4 percent) and higher per capita revenue from the green economy.

The strongest areas of growth in the US are in the renewables sector, particularly consultancy and wind energy which saw increases of 9.36 percent and 8.56 percent in economic value respectively in 2015/16.

The research highlights that while the US is currently the largest market in the global green economy with a 16.5 percent share, other major economies have the capacity to expand and compete with the US.

Notably, China has announced that it aims to generate 13 million clean energy jobs by 2020 and is positioning itself as a new leader in the international climate discussions.

Lead author, Dr. Lucien Georgeson (UCL Geography) said: “Our analysis suggests that the case for driving economic growth and job creation through fossil fuels is weakening, based on the available data.”

“In order to support the development of the green economy, the US needs to focus its attention on designing appropriate economic, environmental and education policies. This should be supported by commissioning and publishing green economy data, which the US Federal government has not done since 2013.”

The research draws on the Low Carbon and Environmental Goods and Services Sector dataset produced by kMatrix Ltd. The figures take into account supply chain businesses and employees.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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By Robin Chazdon, The Conversation

The green belt of tropical rainforests that covers equatorial regions of the Americas, Africa, Indonesia and Southeast Asia is turning brown. Since 1990, Indonesia has lost 50 percent of its original forest, the Amazon 30 percent and Central Africa 14 percent Fires, logging, hunting, road building and fragmentation have heavily damaged more than 30 percent of those that remain.

These forests provide many benefits: They store large amounts of carbon, are home to numerous wild species, provide food and fuel for local people, purify water supplies and improve air quality. Replenishing them is an urgent global imperative. A newly published study in the journal Science by European authors finds that there is room for an extra 3.4 million square miles (0.9 billion hectares) of canopy cover around the world, and that replenishing tree cover at this full potential would contribute significantly to reducing the risk of harmful climate change.

But there aren’t enough resources to restore all tropical forests that have been lost or damaged. And restoration can conflict with other activities, such as farming and forestry. As a tropical forest ecologist, I am interested in developing better tools for assessing where these efforts will be most cost-effective and beneficial.

Over the past four years, tropical forestry professor Pedro Brancalion and I have led a team of researchers from an international network in evaluating the benefits and feasibility of restoration across tropical rainforests around the world. Our newly published findings identify restoration hotspots – areas where restoring tropical forests would be most beneficial and least costly and risky. They cover over 385,000 square miles (100 million hectares), an area as large as Spain and Sweden combined.

The five countries with the largest areas of restoration hotpots are Brazil, Indonesia, India, Madagascar and Colombia. Six countries in Africa – Rwanda, Uganda, Burundi, Togo, South Sudan and Madagascar – hold rainforest areas where restoration is expected to yield the highest benefits with the highest feasibility. We hope our results can help governments, conservation groups and international funders target areas where there is high potential for success.

Intact forest landscapes in tropical regions declined by 7.2 percent from 2000 to 2013, mainly due to logging, clearing and fires.

These losses have dire consequences for global biodiversity, climate change and forest-dependent peoples.

As my work has shown, tropical forests can recover after they have been cleared or damaged. Although these second-growth forests will never perfectly replace the older forests that have been lost, planting carefully selected trees and assisting natural recovery processes can restore many of their former properties and functions.

But restoration is not uniformly feasible or desirable, and the benefits that forests provide are not evenly distributed. To make informed choices about restoration efforts and investments, organizations need more detailed spatial information. Existing global maps of restoration opportunities are based on actual versus potential levels of tree canopy cover. We wanted to go beyond this measurement to identify where the greatest potential payoffs and challenges lay.

Our study used high-resolution satellite imagery and the latest peer-reviewed research to integrate information about four benefits from forest restoration: biodiversity conservation, climate change mitigation, climate change adaptation and water security. We also assessed three aspects of feasibility: cost, investment risk and the likelihood of restored forests surviving into the future.

We studied these variables across all lowland tropical moist forests worldwide, dividing them into 1-kilometer square blocks that had lost more than 10 percent of their tree canopy cover in 2016. Each of the seven factors we studied had equal weight in our calculation of total restoration opportunity scores.

The top-scoring blocks, which we call “restoration hotspots,” represent the most compelling regions for tropical forest restoration, with maximum overall benefits and minimal negative trade-offs.

The top 15 countries with the largest areas of restoration hotspots are distributed across all tropical rainforest regions around the world. Three are in Central and South America, five are in Africa and the Middle East, and seven are in Asia and the Pacific.

Importantly, 89% of the hotspots we identified were located within areas that have already been identified as biodiversity conservation hotspots in tropical regions. These conservation hotspots have exceptionally high concentrations of at-risk species. They have been focal areas for investment and activities to promote biodiversity conservation for nearly 20 years.

This finding makes sense, since two criteria for designating conservation hotspots – high rates of forest loss and high concentration of endemic, or locally distributed, species – were also variables in our study. Our results strongly support the need to develop and implement integrated solutions that protect remaining forest ecosystems and restore new forests within these high-priority regions.

We also found that 73 percent of tropical forest restoration hotspots are in countries that have made commitments under the Bonn Challenge, a global effort to bring some 580,000 square miles (150 million hectares) of the world’s deforested and damaged land into restoration by 2020, and 1.35 million square miles (350 million hectares) by 2030. By making these pledges, Bonn Challenge participants have shown that they are politically motivated to restore and conserve forests, and are looking for restoration opportunities.

The 88 percent of the lands we analyzed that did not qualify as restoration hotspots also deserve careful attention. These landscapes could be prioritized for restoration interventions that increase food, water and fuel security through agroforestry practices, watershed protection, woodlots for producing firewood and local timber or commercial tree plantations. All of these areas can provide benefits for people and the environment through combinations of different restoration approaches, even if they are not the best candidates for a full-scale effort to restore a high-functioning forest.

Forest restoration is urgently needed in all forests around the world, such as seasonally dry tropical forests and temperate forests that are heavily managed for timber and mining. Identifying key restoration opportunities in these regions requires separate studies based on their unique benefits and challenges.

Restoring tropical forests provides multiple benefits for people and nature, and aligns with existing conservation and sustainable development agendas, as discussed in a newly published perspective related to the new findings in Science. We hope that our map of restoration opportunities and hotspots will provide useful guidance for nations, conservation organizations and funders, and that local communities and organizations will be engaged in and benefit from these efforts.

Read The Full Story About Forest Conservation and Reforestation.

Sacred Seedlings is a global initiative to support forest conservation, reforestation, urban forestry, carbon capture, sustainable agriculture and wildlife conservation. Sustainable land management is critical to the survival of entire ecosystems. Sacred Seedlings is a charitable division of Crossbow Communications.

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