Rainforest Concern
Forests Now Declaration
Peter Bennett, Executive Director and founder of Rainforest Concern, one of the UK’s leading rainforest protection charities, strongly welcomed the Forests Now Declaration:
“Until now the popular debate about climate change has failed to
address what is increasingly becoming the elephant in the living room
of climate change – deforestation – its role as one of the key causes
of greenhouse gas emissions and as one of the most immediate and cost
effective forms of reducing global carbon emissions.
The climate change debate has become so skewed towards energy and clean
technology that deforestation barely makes it above the parapet. Yet
the latest IPCC report, the Stern Report and the recent study by the
consulting firm McKinsey all conclude that over the next two decades
the most effective way to control climate change is to keep carbon
locked in the world’s forests.
With the world's tropical forests vanishing at ever increasing rates it
is vital that environmental organisations start working together
through initiatives like the Forest Now Declaration, led by Andew
Mitchell, to ensure deforestation takes its rightful role at the centre
of the climate change debate before it is too late.”
The Forests Now Declaration was signed in the Amazon rainforest
this week by key stakeholders, including Amazonas State Secretary of
Environment Virgílio Viana, and representatives of the association of
indigenous people of the Brazilian Amazon, NGOs and scientists.
This vital Declaration is now to be signed in the other great tropical
forests of the world before reaching Bali for the UNFCCC meeting in
December 2007.
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