Living With Climate Change: Protecting forests is even more powerful in the climate fight than we thought

As climate policymakers follow up on Glasgow’s developments when they gather at the U.N.’s COP27 negotiations in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, this week and next to assess progress toward the Paris Agreement goals, new research adds compelling reasons why it is increasingly critical for leaders to double down on fulfilling their pledge.

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Deforestation historically has taken place to clear land for crops, livestock grazing or building development. In other cases, it’s the result of poor practices to harvest lumber
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and wood pulp, and in some forests, to harvest palm oil.

Ending deforestation is already recognized as a double win for the climate. Healthy forests not only keep climate-warming carbon safely stored in trunks, branches, leaves, roots and soils; forests also actively pull carbon out of the atmosphere, providing a safe, proven and cost-effective strategy for mitigating the vast amount of carbon released every year from all sources, from transportation to agriculture. 

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Now, a growing body of research is showing that forests have a whole set of additional, undervalued and overwhelmingly positive benefits for the climate. Through their impacts on the movement of moisture and heat into and through the atmosphere, forests improve food and water security, protect human health, and enhance our ability to adapt to a warming planet — and also supercharge tropical forests’ already significant global cooling benefits.

And when local officials understand the more local benefits of protecting forests, they have both the motivation and authority to take action rather than feeling helpless to affect the trajectory of global climate change.

By failing to take forests’ biophysical effects on the climate into account, current policies systematically undervalue forests’ true value. These policies fail to anticipate all the climate risks associated with deforestation, and lead to responsibilities and resources being inequitably allocated within and between nations. 

The good news is, there is ample room for policymakers to act through current agreements and institutions.

For example, although the Paris Agreement explicitly calls out the non-carbon benefits of forests, current ways of accounting for national climate action are denominated solely in greenhouse gas emissions. 

Countries should consider adjusting their accounting to rectify the systematic bias against many forest-rich developing countries and Indigenous territories, which deserve more recognition and finance for the additional global cooling effects of protecting their forests.

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Global and regional institutions — including development financiers such as the World Bank — should step up their support to countries to assess and manage the risks of deforestation-related water and heat stress, and to cooperate to address the effects that cross national boundaries. 

Further, all countries’ climate change adaptation plans should incorporate the local climate-stabilizing effects of forest cover on temperature and rainfall. 

Wealthy countries have both a moral responsibility and self-interest to increase forest finance to developing countries for both climate mitigation and increased resilience.

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