Earth Today | New FAO report champions end to deforestation
Published:Thursday | December 29, 2022 | 12:29 AM
THE FOOD and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) is championing an end to deforestation as a cost-effective, equitable and necessary response to prevailing global challenges – from poverty and food insecurity to climate change and biodiversity loss.
In its The State of the World’s Forests 2022 report, the FAO identifies halting deforestation as one of three forest-based pathways to tackling these global challenges. Forests, the report reveals, are too valuable to ignore as a part of the solution to the varied threats facing the world.
Not only do forests cover 31 per cent of the Earth’s land surface, the report reminds, it is also estimated that more than 50 per cent (or US$84.4 trillion in 2020) of the world gross domestic product depends on ecosystem services, including those provided by forests.
These services include filtering water supplies, cleaning the air, flood and erosion control, and the provision of food and fuel – as performed by the forests of Jamaica’s Cockpit Country and the Blue and John Crow Mountains National Park. Both are recognised among the Caribbean’s Key Biodiversity Areas (KBAs), including as a refuge from human disturbance for endemic plant and animal species. Further, they are the two known sites for the Giant Swallowtail Butterfly, the largest butterfly in the western hemisphere; and are home to a significant number of Jamaica’s amphibian population.
Forests globally are home to 80 per cent of amphibian species, 75 per cent of bird species and 68 per cent of mammal species.
“About 33 million people (or one per cent of global employment) are estimated to work directly in the formal and informal forest sector,” the FAO report said.
That there is need to move with urgency to halt deforestation is also seen in, among other things, the linkages between public health and forests.
“More than 30 per cent of new diseases reported since 1960 are attributed to land-use change, including deforestation, and 15 per cent of 250 emerging infectious diseases have been linked to forests,” the report said.
“Deforestation, particularly in the tropics, has been associated with an increase in infectious diseases such as dengue fever and malaria,” it added.
Halting deforestation and maintaining forest ecosystem services is projected to be one on the most cost-effective actions to benefit not only human health, but also long-term food security, biodiversity, and the climate.
“Globally, ecosystems at risk of deforestation or degradation contain at least 260 Gt of irrecoverable or difficult-to-recover carbon, particularly in peatlands, mangroves, old-growth forests and marshes. Unless additional action is taken, an estimated 289 million ha of forests would be deforested between 2016 and 2050 in the tropics alone, resulting in the emission of 169 GtCO2e,” the report said.
The changing climate, which present risks to lives, livelihoods and entire country economies, is fuelled by the emissions of greenhouse gases, including carbon dioxide, which is captured and stored by trees. In performing their function as carbon sinks, forests help to slow global warming which fuel climate impacts such as extreme hurricane events, the likes of which have devastated parts of the Caribbean over recent years.
“Evidence suggests that halting deforestation would [also] generate multiple other local and global benefits – such as biodiversity conservation, disaster reduction, the protection of soils and water, and the maintenance of pollination services – that far exceed the cost of halting deforestation. It would also increase the adaptive capacity and resilience of people and ecosystems,” the report noted.