Do Forest Conservation Pledges Really Make a Difference? 🌲

This article by Matthew Spencer originally appeared in Mongabay.

• The New York Declaration on Forests was agreed with great hope 10 years ago, but the world missed its 2020 target and is off track to end deforestation by 2030. Does this mean that forest pledges don’t work?
• It would be naive to expect pledges like it to quickly resolve decades long economic and political battles over land: their effect is limited without changes to forest funding, because forest clearance is usually driven by economic calculation.
• “The NYDF has not made history, but it did help redirect attention in a distracted world and create a benchmark for progress. Without it and the Glasgow Declaration, there would be less support for the many communities and institutions who are helping protect the two thirds of remaining tropical forests which are still standing,” a new op-ed states.
• This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily Mongabay or Ground Truth.

In late September 2014 a besuited and bearded Leonardo DiCaprio stood at the grey marble dais in the UN General Assembly in New York and declared somberly that world leaders had to ‘make history or be vilified by it.’ The pressure was mounting for climate action and governments, companies and NGOs responded with a blizzard of announcements including the high-profile New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF), which committed signatories to halve deforestation by 2020, and end it by 2030.

Sadly, in the years immediately following the signing, deforestation actually increased, and the first target was missed. Deforestation has been on a downward trend since 2017 but the world is currently off track to end forest loss by the end of the decade. The perceived failure of the New York Declaration is a key reason the EU is introducing its tough new deforestation regulation (EUDR).

At this year’s New York Climate Week there were lots of forest events but no discussion on the NYDF, or what its weakness might mean for its ‘upgraded’ Glasgow version agreed three years ago, with even greater support. It was therefore a surprise find that many veterans of forest policy I spoke to there felt that the New York Declaration had been worthwhile, despite the failure to meet its 2020 target.

There were also people who felt it had been a mistake to get companies and governments to sign up to a target that they didn’t know how to deliver, and a veteran NGO staffer recalled the opprobrium heaped on one commodity trader for not signing, after they had assessed the numbers internally and concluded it unlikely that the targets would be met.

But others, and notably some of the most active forest campaigners, were more generous in their interpretation. Glenn Hurowitz, CEO of Mighty Earth, emphasized how the companies and sectors that had been serious about eradicating deforestation had made their no deforestation pledges work. He contrasted the success of oil palm and pulp and paper companies, with whom he had crossed swords many times, with the performance of the beef and soy sectors, whom he felt had not taken their commitments seriously.

Bustar Maitar, an Indonesian forest activist of 20 years, reinforced the positive side effects of the declaration. He’d spent years campaigning to end oil palm deforestation and made himself pretty unpopular with the sector, until a breakthrough in 2011 when the biggest Indonesian palm oil player GAR committed to protecting High Conservation Value forests. The owners of the company traveled to New York in 2014 and Maitar recalled them feeling really proud to be part of an international agreement.

Business supply chain commitments led to much greater investment in sustainable palm production and demonstrated that oil palm companies could be commercially successful without clearing new land. It reduced the economic barriers for Indonesian President Jokowi to be able to introduce a moratorium on new palm oil plantations in 2018 and by 2022 the country was experiencing a 20 year low in deforestation. Indeed, thanks in large part to the efforts of Indonesia and Malaysia, Asia is the region closest to being on track to end deforestation by 2030.

These differing interpretations reminded me of the comments by a C-suite executive from a leading consumer goods company who classified his staff as ‘poets’ or ‘farmers’ – the poets are narrative-led and love shaping agreements that signal ambition to policy makers and the market, and the farmers are focused on delivery and the mechanics of execution. If you play the role of a farmer, pledges can feel naive, particularly if the investment in delivering them is inadequate, but it doesn’t mean the poets are wrong, since fighting for resources without a pledge is usually much harder.

Per Pharo, one of the godfathers of Norway’s International Climate and Forests initiative (NICFI) which was one of the biggest funders of action to implement the NYDF, was in a philosophical mood, reflecting that the nature of ambitious targets is that they often fail, but if they help trigger action, the counterfactual is likely to be a lot worse. He agreed with Horowitz that it had driven greater supply chain action, but felt that progress on investments to reward the ecosystem services provided by forests had been less impressive.

See related: How do the Glasgow and New York declarations compare?

Poets and farmers in the forest community would agree that funding for forest protection is far too low. It is estimated at $2.3 billion a year, roughly the cost of building two major league football stadiums and a fraction of the value of forests as climate and weather regulators, let alone their role as cultural and biodiversity hotspots.

Speaking at a Climate Week event, David Cleary, Director of Global Agriculture at The Nature Conservancy made an impassioned plea for resources to protect the Brazilian Cerrado, the biodiverse woody savanna which has already been cleared from half of its range. Highlighting the need for incentives to buy time for the remaining Cerrado, he came up with an even more poignant comparison, reminding the audience that a U.S. stealth bomber cost $1.2 billion, and suggesting that we could choose between ‘one more bomber or an entire biome.’

It would be naive to expect pledges like NYDF to quickly resolve decades long economic and political battles over land. However, their effect is limited without changes to forest funding precisely because forest clearance is usually driven by economic calculation. The standout forest announcement in New York was that Para, the Brazilian state which will host the Amazon climate COP next year, had made a $180 million deal with the LEAF Coalition for jurisdictional forest credits. It was greeted by Pharo as a pivot point for environmental markets.

In parallel, the Brazilians are hoping to build support for their new $250 billion Tropical Forests Forever Fund, and raising  investment in a bold, 40 million hectare pasture restoration program, which should reduce pressure on existing forest. They are the sort of ambitious mechanisms which can’t be generated by pledges written for international meetings, because they emerge from the needs and opportunities within a forest-rich country, but equally they wouldn’t have a big audience without them.

The paradox is that forest pledges illustrate the low control that signatories have on deforestation dynamics, while simultaneously helping them grow their influence on forest protection by creating a moment of alignment within governments and companies. The NYDF has not made history, but it did help redirect attention in a distracted world and create a benchmark for progress. Without it and the Glasgow Declaration, there would be less support for the many communities and institutions who are helping protect the two thirds of remaining tropical forests which are still standing.

Matthew Spencer is Turner Fellow at the Cambridge Conservation Initiative and Global Director of Landscapes at IDH.

License

Spencer, Matthew. Do Forest Conservation Pledges Work? (Commentary). Mongabay, 6 Nov. 2024. Republished under a Creative Commons Attribution-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License with minor changes.