Nations are not spending enough to ensure that the forests that cover nearly a third of the planet remain healthy, according to a new United Nations report. To meet various international climate, biodiversity and land restoration goals, annual global spending needs to triple to $300 billion by 2030, the report found.
Forests are the “quintessential definition of a public good,” because of the benefits they provide, said Gabriel Labbate, who leads the climate mitigation unit at the U.N. Environmental Program and is one of the lead authors of the analysis.
By providing habitat to more than 80 percent of all animals, plants and insects on land, healthy forests are key to sustaining life on Earth. They also help regulate weather patterns and the global climate. Trees and other plants absorb atmosphere-warming carbon dioxide as they grow, which offsets some of the greenhouse gases that are emitted from the burning of fossil fuels and are dangerously heating the planet.
The report estimated that roughly 25 million acres are destroyed each year for human industries and extreme wildfires, which are increasing in frequency and intensity as the planet warms. In 2023 and 2024, wildfires consumed some 78 million acres — an area roughly three times the size of Iceland — worldwide. As a result, during those years forests absorbed only a quarter of the carbon they captured 100 years ago.
Governments from more than 140 countries signed a declaration at a U.N. climate conference in Glasgow in 2021 agreeing to halt or reverse deforestation by 2030. In 2023, the world spent some $84 billion protecting forests.
The new report used a wide range of data to analyze as many sources of funding as possible, from governments and private institutions, that protect all forest types, from tropical rainforests to boreal forests in the Arctic.
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The post To Meet Pledges to Save Forests Spending Must Triple, U.N. Report Says appeared first on New York Times.
