Rishi Sunak has pledged the UK’s continued support for conserving threatened forests around the world, through a funding programme covering a third of the world’s forests, at the Cop27 UN climate summit in Egypt.
Brazil is expected to join the initiative, under the incoming president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and new funding from the public and private sector will take the spending for forest conservation above $20bn over the next five years. The moves form part of efforts to tackle emissions from land use, the second biggest driver of global heating, of which tropical deforestation is a significant component.
The Forest and Climate Leaders’ Partnership, launched by the UK prime minister on Monday, builds on an initiative set up at the Cop26 summit in Glasgow last year. The aim is to halt and reverse global forest loss by 2030, extending the programme with a further $1bn funding from Germany and bringing together 25 countries accounting for almost 60% of global GDP.
Of the $12bn pledged for these efforts, about $2.6bn has been spent, which sources told the Guardian represented a big success. One of the problems with climate finance initiatives is they can take years to get off the ground, so disbursing about a fifth of the money for a five-year programme in its first year shows the scheme is on track.
There will be no new UK funding for the partnership, however. Sunak is under fire for aiming to cut UK aid programmes by stealth – by spending more of the money meant for overseas help in the UK, for instance on efforts to support Ukrainian refugees.
Private funding for the partnership has also increased. About $7.2bn was committed to the programme in Glasgow, and $3.6bn will be pledged at Cop27, bringing the total funds committed to $23.8bn.
Craig Hanson, managing director of programmes at the non-profit World Resources Institute, said: “It is deeply encouraging that the new funding announced today puts countries on track to fulfilling the pledge to direct $12bn toward forest-related programs over a five-year period. We commend the United Kingdom for forming this partnership which keeps high-level political attention on fulfilling the historic pledges made in Glasgow to protect and restore forests.”
Three big initiatives to protect forests were launched at Cop26: a commitment by more than 140 leaders to halt and reverse deforestation, the creation of a working group of producers and consumers of commodities linked to deforestation, and a commitment by commodity traders of soya, palm oil, cocoa and cattle to prepare a roadmap to align their business practices with the 1.5C target.
No high-quality data has yet been published on the effect of the agreement on global deforestation rates, which continued at a “relentless” pace in 2021. In the tropics, 11.1m hectares of tree cover were lost last year, including 3.75m hectares of primary forest critical to limiting global heating and biodiversity loss. Most disappeared in Brazil, the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) and Bolivia.
Boreal forests, mainly in Russia, experienced a record loss in 2021, driven by the worst wildfire season in Siberia since records began.
Last month’s election of Lula in Brazil has renewed hope for the future, with the three big tropical rainforest countries – Brazil, the DRC and Indonesia – understood to be in talks to form an alliance, nicknamed the “Opec of rainforests”, to coordinate on finance and carbon markets at UN environment talks.
The Amazon is dangerously close to a tipping point after years of deforestation under Brazil’s far-right outgoing leader, Jair Bolsonaro, and other Amazonian states are keen to restart conservation efforts.
