Rainforest Concern

Climate & Carbon

The role of forests

Forests play a critical role in combating climate change by storing carbon in their vegetation via photosynthesis. When forests are burned, degraded, or cleared, billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere.

Deforestation is considered the second major driver of climate change (more than the entire global transport sector), responsible for approximately 18-25% of global annual carbon dioxide emissions, and most of it happens in the tropics. Drivers of deforestation include conversion to agriculture, cattle ranching, illegal logging, palm oil, road construction, poor public policy and poor governance. Conserving standing forests offers one of the cheapest, most efficient, and immediate solutions to the world’s rapidly rising carbon emissions, as demonstrated by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Stern and McKinsey reports. If we lose the world’s forests, we simply lose the fight against climate change.

But protecting forests is not just about carbon. Forests also provide a wide range of other ecosystem services from which people benefit and upon which all life depends; these include provision of food, freshwater, rainfall generation, flood control, climate regulation, maintenance of biodiversity, fuel, building materials, and medicinal cures, to name a few. In addition, rainforests support the livelihoods of 1.6 billion of the world's poorest people who depend directly or indirectly on these forests for their subsistence. Forests quite literally sustain life on Earth as we know it.

HOW CLIMATE CHANGE HAPPENS

“Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice and rising global average sea level”. (IPCC, 2007)

The greenhouse effect is a natural warming process of the earth. When the sun's energy reaches the Earth some of it is reflected back to space and the rest is absorbed by the atmosphere, land surface and oceans. The absorbed energy warms the Earth's surface, which then emits heat energy back toward space as longwave radiation. This outgoing longwave radiation is partially trapped by greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2), methane and water vapour, which then radiate the energy in all directions, warming the Earth's surface and atmosphere.

Human activities such as deforestation and the burning of fossil fuels have increased the concentrations of these greenhouse gases in the atmosphere leading to an "enhanced" greenhouse effect, causing surface air temperatures to rise which in turn causes changes in climate. A warmer Earth can lead to changes in rainfall patterns, a rise in sea level, and a wide range of impacts on plants, wildlife, and humans.

According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC, 2007) an increase in CO2 is predicted to cause an increase in global air temperature of between 1.1 and 6.4°C this century. A rise of between 1 and 2°C in global mean temperature above 1990 levels poses significant risks to many unique and threatened systems including many biodiversity hotspots; and a rise of more than 2°C will lead to an increasingly high risk of catastrophic climate change which will pose serious threat to human life and to global economic and social systems.