Climate news

The forest connection
The Kyoto Protocol
Impacts on forests
Carbon sinks
What scientists say
Problems with plantations
Strategic solutions
Factfile
Publications

Home

Human activities resulting in excessive greenhouse gas emissions are at the heart of the global climate crisis. Any viable solution will have to address this root cause of global warming - the excessive consumption of fossil fuel in industrialised countries. Planting trees, as long as such planting allows additional releases of fossil carbon will not address the underlying cause of climate change, and is thus not a suitable solution. What is needed instead are measures to ensure that forests can protect forest-dependent communities and forest peoples from extreme weather events, which are already on the rise and which add additional pressures to communities depending on intact forests. Calls for such measures are not new, they boil down to the same activities required to address the global forest crisis: a shift towards forest use that respects indigenous peoples' rights and maintains the diversity of forest ecosystems, reducing overconsumption of timber and paper products in the North, preventing further fragmentation of intact forests for fossil-fuel intensive infrastructure projects, etc.

Realising many of these activities will require political will and additional funds for protection and restoration of forests, and the lack of both has been a significant obstacle to implementation of such activities in the past. However, FERN believes that revenue from carbon credits - hailed to provide the necessary funds for forest protection and restoration - will address neither the root causes of the forest or the climate crisis. However attractive such a shortcut may seem at first glance, it is bound to fail as a strategic solution. FERN will continue to expose the shortcomings of carbon sinks accounting and will call for strategic solutions that are lasting, that protect forest peoples' rights and lifelihoods and which take into consideration the inevitable effects that climate change will have on forests.