From the article: Forests are undervalued assets in meeting the twin global challenges of our time: achieving prosperity and safeguarding climate stability. It’s time we gave them the attention – and finance – that they deserve.
Last week, dozens of countries announced a late-breaking wave of commitments to reduce greenhouse gas emissions ahead of the climate change summit in Paris this November. While such pledges are welcome, they are not yet sufficient to avert catastrophic global warming. Tropical forests provide an opportunity to close the gap.
When tropical forests are cut and left to decay or are burned, as happened on an area almost twice the size of Costa Rica last year, the carbon stored in leaves, branches, trunks, roots and soil is released into the atmosphere. For many forest-rich developing countries, deforestation, not fossil fuel use, is the major source of emissions. If tropical deforestation were a country, it would rank somewherebetween China and the European Union as a source of current annual greenhouse gas emissions. So halting deforestation would be a giant step toward taming climate change.
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