Landscape News

November 16, 2021
The 2021 U.N. Climate Change Summit (COP26) has ended, but many questions remain on the agreements reached by the 197 parties as well as the pledges made by governments.

The Glasgow Climate Pact aims to phase down unabated coal power and end inefficient fossil fuel subsidies, while more than 140 countries have now committed to ending deforestation by 2030.

The two-week event also ended the legal wrangling over Article 6 of the Paris Agreement after six years of discussions, thereby providing a framework for countries to exchange carbon credits through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) as a mechanism to reduce emissions.

Here, climate lawyer and policy advisor Stephen Leonard shares his views on these and other outcomes.

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New Straits Times

November 7, 2021
Since 1994 the United Nations (UN) has convened almost every country on Earth for an annual summit known as the Conference of the Parties (COP) to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

This year's two-week 26th meeting, COP26, is described as "the most significant climate event since the 2015 Paris Agreement" which committed nations to limiting global warming to well below 2°C (preferably 1.5°C), and "the world's best and last chance to get runaway climate change under control."

United States President Joe Biden, Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, and Indonesian President Joko Widodo were among the 200 world leaders attending the first two days of the conference in Glasgow, Scotland.

Malaysia is ably represented by the savvy Secretary-General of the Water and Environment Ministry Datuk Seri Dr Zaini Ujang.

The conspicuous absence of more senior representation, though, seemed to many a sign that Malaysians were nonchalant about the event. That is, until a big headline appeared saying that more than 100 world leaders had promised to end and reverse deforestation by 2030.

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BBC News

November 2, 2021
Brazil - where stretches of the Amazon rainforest have been cut down - was among the signatories on Tuesday.

The pledge includes almost £14bn ($19.2bn) of public and private funds.

Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had "failed to slow deforestation at all" and commitments needed to be delivered on.

Felling trees contributes to climate change because it depletes forests that absorb vast amounts of the warming gas CO2.

UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the global meeting in Glasgow, said "more leaders than ever before" - a total of 110 - had made the "landmark" commitment.

"We have to stop the devastating loss of our forests," he said - and "end the role of humanity as nature's conqueror, and instead become nature's custodian".

The two-week summit in Glasgow is seen as crucial if climate change is to be brought under control.

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Associated Press

November 2, 2021
World leaders promised to protect Earth’s forests, cut methane emissions and help South Africa wean itself off coal at the U.N. climate summit Tuesday — part of a flurry of deals intended to avert catastrophic global warming.

Britain hailed the commitment by more than 100 countries to end deforestation in the coming decade as the first big achievement of the conference in the Scottish city of Glasgow, known as COP26 — but experts noted such promises have been made and broken before.

More than 120 world leaders were heading home after two days in which they received stark warnings about the state of the Earth from Johnson, naturalist David Attenborough, Queen Elizabeth II and — most powerfully — the people of countries and regions already facing climate upheaval.

Johnson said at a news conference that it was important to “guard against false hope,” but added that he was “cautiously optimistic” about the outcome of the talks. The conference aims to keep the world on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels — the goal set at the Paris climate conference six years ago.

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New York Times

November 2, 2021
In a sweeping accord aimed at protecting the world’s forests, which are crucial to absorbing carbon dioxide and slowing the rise in global warming, leaders of more than 100 countries gathered in Glasgow vowed on Tuesday to end deforestation by 2030.

President Biden said the United States would contribute billions to the global effort to protect the ecosystems that are vital for cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink, and keeping the Earth’s climate in balance.

The pact — which also includes countries such as Brazil, Russia and China — encompasses about 85 percent of the world’s forests, officials said. It is one of the first major accords to emerge from the United Nations climate summit known as COP26, which is seen as a crucial moment in efforts to address climate change.
“These great teeming ecosystems — these cathedrals of nature,” Prime Minister Boris Johnson of Britain said in announcing the agreement, “are the lungs of our planet.”

President Biden said he would work with Congress to deploy up to $9 billion to the global effort through 2030. Additionally, governments committed $12 billion through 2025, and private companies pledged $7 billion to protect and restore forests in a variety of ways, including $1.7 billion for Indigenous peoples. More than 30 financial institutions also vowed to stop investing in companies responsible for deforestation.

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Ford Foundation

November 1, 2021
The UK, Norway, Germany, the US, and the Netherlands, in partnership with 17 funders, pledged today to invest US$1.7 billion to help Indigenous and local communities protect the biodiverse tropical forests that are vital to protecting the planet from climate change, biodiversity loss, and pandemic risk, according to an announcement made today at a high-level World Leaders Summit at COP26.

“We are demonstrating our commitment today by announcing an initial, collective pledge of $1.7 billion of financing, from 2021 to 2025, to support the advancement of Indigenous Peoples’ and local communities’ forest tenure rights and greater recognition and rewards for their role as guardians of forests and nature,” says a statement released today by the donors. “We call on other donors to significantly increase their support to this important agenda.”

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Bloomberg

November 1, 2021
One hundred countries, representing 85% of the world’s forests, have given themselves nine years to halt and reverse deforestation, in a major new commitment at global climate change talks on Tuesday.

Brazil, Russia, Canada, Colombia and Indonesia will be among the nations committing to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by 2030 at the third day of COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, in an initiative spearheaded by the conference host, the U.K.

The inclusion of Brazil, home to the world’s largest tropical rainforest, is crucial to the initiative and comes amid a turnaround in the country’s ambitions to reduce emissions and tackle deforestation. Across the world as a whole, an area of forest the size of 27 soccer pitches is lost every minute, according to the U.K.

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The Guardian

October 14, 2021
The calls for biodiversity and the climate crisis to be tackled in tandem are growing. “It is clear that we cannot solve [the global biodiversity and climate crises] in isolation – we either solve both or we solve neither,” says Sveinung Rotevatn, Norway’s climate and environment minister, with the launch in June of a report produced by the world’s leading biodiversity and climate experts. Zoological Society of London senior research fellow Dr Nathalie Pettorelli, who led a study on the subject published in the Journal of Applied Ecology in September, says: “The level of interconnectedness between the climate change and biodiversity crises is high and should not be underestimated. This is not just about climate change impacting biodiversity; it is also about the loss of biodiversity deepening the climate crisis.”

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Reuters

July 14, 2021
More than 10,000 species of plants and animals are at high risk of extinction due to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest - 35% of which has already been deforested or degraded, according to the draft of a landmark scientific report published on Wednesday.

Produced by the Science Panel for the Amazon (SPA), the 33-chapter report brings together research on the world's largest rainforest from 200 scientists from across the globe. It is the most detailed assessment of the state of the forest to date and both makes clear the vital role the Amazon plays in global climate and the profound risks it is facing.

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EurekAlert!

July 13, 2021
Scientists have published a global study on the effectiveness of protected areas in preventing deforestation.

The study, published recently in Environmental Research Letters, explored the success of country-level protected areas at reducing forest loss, and used machine learning to uncover some of the factors that contribute to differences in effectiveness.

"Protected areas are a key conservation tool that are essential for stemming the tide of biodiversity and habitat loss across the Earth," said first author, Dr. Payal Shah, a research scientist at the Okinawa Institute of Science and Technology (OIST), who specializes in applying economic theory to conservation.

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Bloomberg Green

March 21, 2021
Global businesses sourcing commodities such as cattle, soybeans or rubber stand to lose some $53 billion due to deforestation unless they take action.

In a survey of more than 500 global businesses, climate-disclosure platform CDP identified risks such as extreme weather, changes in consumer preferences, as well as market and reputational impacts from commodity-related forest loss. It would cost $6.6 billion in the coming years to address those risks, the London-based nonprofit said in a report Monday.

“The destruction of the world’s vital forests poses huge risks to the climate, nature, the economy, and also increases the risk of future pandemics,” Sareh Forouzesh, CDP’s associate director of forests, said in a statement. “There is a solid business case for companies sourcing commodities sustainably and taking steps to protect forests.”

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Reuters

February 25, 2021
The rate of destruction of the world’s tropical forests is likely to have gathered pace last year, green groups warned, as the pandemic weakened environmental regulations, cut funding for protection work and forced city migrants back to rural areas.

In 2019, tropical rainforests disappeared at a rate of one football pitch every six seconds, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch (GFW), despite more awareness of the key role of carbon-storing forests in slowing climate change.

The tracking platform, which uses satellite imagery and is run by the U.S.-based think-tank World Resources Institute (WRI), is due to release its deforestation numbers for 2020 - when the COVID-19 pandemic struck - in the next three months.

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Mongabay

February 23, 2021
[…] A year has gone by since I first reported on an urgent plea from renowned Brazilian climate scientist Carlos Nobre and U.S. conservation biologist Thomas Lovejoy, warning that the Amazon biome was teetering on its tipping point.

“We stand exactly in a moment of destiny: The tipping point is here, it is now.” they said. If the Amazon loses just 3% to 8% more of its tree cover, they wrote, it could trigger a rapidly unfolding domino effect turning more than half the towering rainforest into degraded grasslands. “We believe that negative synergies between deforestation, climate change, and widespread use of fire indicate a tipping point for the Amazon system to flip to non-forest ecosystems in eastern, southern and central Amazonia at 20-25% deforestation,” the pair wrote in a letter to Science Advances in 2018.

As a Brazilian journalist, observing the Amazon — one of Earth’s most biodiverse places, and the life source for millions of families in my nation — I’ve been hit close to home as nature’s bounty is exchanged for short-term profits from beef and soy exports.

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Forest Peoples Programme

February 18, 2021
In their quest to bolster economies battered by the pandemic, governments in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Peru have set aside social and environmental safeguards in favor of destructive development projects that are harming Indigenous communities and the forests they care for, according to a report released today by Forest Peoples Programme.

Open-pit mines, industrial agriculture plantations, infrastructure mega-schemes and hydropower complexes are among the projects fueling a rise in human rights abuses and deforestation in five countries that contain the majority of the world’s tropical forests.

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Earth.Com

February 12, 2021
A new study from Oregon State University has found that while the rate of deforestation is reduced in protected areas, it is still not prevented. Considering that most terrestrial species live in forests, deforestation has major implications for future biodiversity loss.

“Evidence indicates that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event the likes of which the planet has seen only five times before,” said study leader Christopher Wolf. “Formally protected areas have been proposed as a primary tool for reducing deforestation, and therefore stemming species extinctions and slowing reductions in carbon storage.”

The research is believed to represent the first comprehensive look at how effective protected areas are at limiting forest loss. The investigation was focused on more than 18,000 land parcels spanning two million square miles across 63 countries.

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