The first climax came on the second day of the Glasgow climate summit: an agreement to stop deforestation by 2030. British Prime Minister Boris Johnson spoke of a “milestone” that could help improve the negotiating climate over the next ten days to enhance.

After a rather mixed start in Glasgow and the poor result of the previous G-20 summit in Rome for most climate delegates, an agreement between 110 states was presented on Tuesday morning, which should finally bring a turning point in global forest policy.

Joachim Müller-Jung

Editor in the features section, responsible for the “Nature and Science” section.

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Intact forests, especially the huge tropical forests, are a decisive brake on climate change.

If they grow or at least remain untouched, they take up carbon dioxide and store it in large quantities in the wood and in the soil.

That is why forest protection has always been a decisive factor in the climate negotiations.

A factor with many diplomatic heights - but above all on paper.

As early as 2014, in the UN New York Declaration on the Protection of Forests, many of the most densely forested countries promised to end deforestation by 2030.

That was hailed as a breakthrough in the fight against deforestation.

Since then, deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has increased by almost forty percent.

Many observers are therefore skeptical that among the signatory states to the new forest agreement, in addition to Indonesia and Russia, there is also Brazil.

Brazil was already accused of “greenwashing” at the beginning of the conference when the country presented its new national climate targets, in which it promised to curb the exploitation of the rainforest, contrary to national agricultural and industrial policy.

Brazil allegedly wants to cut greenhouse gas emissions by half by 2030 compared to 2005.

The United Nations has announced that it will review the national targets.

Means for the renaturation of cleared forest areas

Around 85 percent of the world's forest areas are in the 110 countries that have signed the new forest agreement. That alone makes this announcement so significant. More than two dozen of the forest-rich countries have also announced that they will largely forego the export of food such as cocoa and soy, for which forest areas are cleared. This affects the large forest countries, three quarters of which trade in raw materials, the extraction of which, like palm oil, directly threatens the existence of the local forest areas.

The forest protection initiative is financed by twelve donor countries, including, as is so often the case in global forest protection, Norway, Great Britain and Germany, which together have pledged twelve billion US dollars by 2025.

This also includes funds for the renaturation of cleared forest areas and for increasing the transparency of supply chains.

In addition, private investors have contributed 7.2 billion euros, including a new fund with 1.5 billion dollars to protect the African rainforest in the Congo Basin.

In the course of the agreement, more than 30 of the world's financially strongest financial investors have also signed a commitment to refrain from investing in companies involved in deforestation.

Indigenous peoples as partners

The initiative for the indigenous peoples around the world is also unique, as they have been increasingly included in the diplomatic network of the United Nations as “guardians” of the primeval forests, but who have benefited comparatively little from the money for climate protection. In a recently presented UN meta-study it was shown that the destruction of the rainforest where indigenous people live is only half as great as in other rainforest areas.

Thousands of such long-established ethnic groups settle around fifty percent of the managed forest areas, but they only have real land rights on ten percent of the area. So far, they have only received three percent of the funding for climate protection. In Glasgow, 17 states - with Germany, Norway, the USA, Canada and Great Britain at the top - together with a number of philanthropic organizations announced the pledge of 1.7 billion exclusively for indigenous peoples.

As the President of the Ford Foundation, Darren Walker, said, the funds should end the "paternalism" in dealing with forest resources and help the indigenous people to control the most valuable forest areas for climate and species protection.

For the first time, the indigenous ethnic groups are also explicitly mentioned as partners in the forest agreement of the COP26 countries.