Norway has pledged 145 million kroner ($16.6m) to an international partnership to combat illegal deforestation and help reach Paris climate accord goals.

Climate and Environment Minister Ola Elvestuen says deforestation is a multi-million business for criminals that cut down “invaluable tropical forests”, adding “their activities have detrimental consequences for sustainable development in rainforest nations and the global climate”.

He says “halting and reversing land degradation and tropical deforestation could provide up to 30% of the climate change solution”.

Elvestuen said on Wednesday at a conference that the partnership includes Interpol, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and a UN-supported center combatting illegal deforestation, known as the RHIPTO-Norwegian Centre for Global Analyses.

(AP)

New findings released today in Oslo suggest Indigenous Peoples and local communities dramatically outperform other managers, conserving lands and forests for a quarter the cost of public and private investments to conserve protected areas.

The new report, “Cornered by Protected Areas,” co-authored by Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples Victoria Tauli-Corpuz and the Rights and Resources Initiative (RRI) was released as forest researchers here revealed a spike in deforestation that threatens efforts to reach global climate goals.

“If we are to save the world’s forests and prevent a climate crisis, Indigenous Peoples and local communities must be part of the solution,” Tauli-Corpuz reminded participants from government, civil society, and the scientific community at the world’s largest gathering on tropical forests and their role in achieving global climate and development goals. “Based on a growing body of evidence, they make tremendous contributions, conserving some of the most biodiverse lands on Earth.”

Separately, but also in Oslo, a new analysis from the University of Maryland on Global Forest Watch was released today, reporting the loss of a record-high 15.8 million hectares of tropical forest cover in 2017. The findings suggest that efforts of Indigenous Peoples to conserve the world’s forests and forest carbon are more urgent than ever before, said Tauli-Corpuz.

“This conservation research underscores the cost of ignoring communities and their immense contributions to conservation,” said Alain Frechette, Director of Strategic Analysis and Global Engagement at RRI. “Investments in forest protection would be more efficient and more just if allocated to the people who have kept the forests standing up until now.”

Indigenous Peoples and local communities have customary rights to at least half of the world’s land, but legal ownership over just 10 percent. Research has shown that legally recognized indigenous and community forests store more carbon and experience lower rates of deforestation than forests under other tenure regimes—including protected areas.

Despite protecting their lands—often for generations—Indigenous Peoples and local communities are confronting a growing trend in the designation of their lands across the Global South as “protected areas,” creating a crisis of criminalization and human rights violations, according to the findings presented today by Tauli-Corpuz.

“Instead of partnering with the people who live in and depend on forests, conservation initiatives continue to drive communities from their ancestral lands, part of a larger trend of criminalization worldwide,” said Tauli-Corpuz. “In some cases, they are declared squatters in their own territories. In my capacity as Special Rapporteur, I have seen a disturbing uptick of harassment, criminalization, and even extrajudicial killings targeting communities.”

The new report examined the impacts of protected areas on Indigenous People and local communities in 28 countries, and estimated the conservation investments of communities in 14 countries. It concluded that:

• Indigenous Peoples and local communities have only limited recognition of their community land rights in protected areas;

• In spite of this legal insecurity, indigenous and local communities worldwide invest up to US$4.57 billion per year in conservation, including up to US$1.71 billion per year in forest conservation—as much as 23 percent of the amount spent on land and forest conservation by the formal environmental community;

• Communities achieved equal or better conservation results with lower levels of investment—showing that they are not only the most effective, but also the most costeffective stewards of their lands.

In Peru, for instance, legal recognition of community forest rights reduced deforestation and disturbance by as much as 81 percent in the year following titling, and by 56 percent the year after; in other words, securing land rights can lead to immediate environmental benefits.

In Brazil, community forests store 36 percent more carbon per hectare than other forests. And given that indigenous and local community lands hold at least one quarter of the world’s aboveground tropical forest carbon—and likely much more—ensuring that communities have secure rights to these lands is critical to larger efforts to protect forests and the carbon they contain.

Governments and environmental organizations have made numerous commitments and pledged to adhere to international standards, yet the communities responsible for maintaining the world’s lands and forests face increasing threats.

The trend of “militarization of conservation”—arming park rangers and organizing them as a military unit—began as a way to help rangers defend themselves against poachers and organized terrorists, but the report notes that violence by armed rangers against unarmed Indigenous Peoples and local communities has been documented in the Central African

Republic, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Guatemala, South Africa, and elsewhere.

India’s Kaziranga National Park alone has seen 106 extrajudicial killings in the last 20 years. Elsewhere, communities face criminalization and violence for practicing their traditional livelihoods.

The findings come as the Special Rapporteur herself faces charges of terrorism in her native Philippines by President Rodrigo Duterte’s government, which Tauli-Corpuz believes were filed in retaliation for her advocacy on behalf of displaced Indigenous Peoples in the Mindanao region of the Philippines.

“The science is clear: forests are the best tool we have to combat climate change, and to conserve our forests we need to recognize the rights of the Indigenous Peoples and local communities who invest in protecting them,” said Frechette. “Global conservation schemes such as REDD+ and the Aichi Biodiversity Targets reference the need to consult Indigenous Peoples and local communities. But this is clearly not enough. In order to fully respect the rights of the world’s Indigenous Peoples, we urgently need to move toward rights-based conservation models that can secure human well-being and global progress on climate and development priorities.”

A “golden age” of technology–from satellites and remote sensing to cloud computing, drones and innovative ground data collection–have enabled the tracking and monitoring of the world’s tropical forests, providing an unprecedented opportunity to maximize the role forests play is soaking up and storing carbon and providing many goods and services for sustainable development, reveals a working paper released today at a major global gathering focused on efforts to save the world’s rainforests.

“If we have hope of protecting the world’s forests, everyone involved–from policymakers and law enforcement to investors and indigenous peoples–must embrace the full power of the information age,” said Rachael Petersen, Deputy Director of Global Forest Watch. “Though forests have been here for millennia, only in the last 10 years, thanks to these new tools and data sources, have we gained a detailed understanding of how forest cover is changing worldwide.”

The working paper “Tropical Forest Monitoring,” by a team of researchers from World Resources Institute and Wageningen University, is one of nine studies released today at the opening of the two-day Oslo Tropical Forest Forum, an event hosted by the Norwegian government to celebrate results and identify remaining challenges 10 years after reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) was included in the climate change negotiations, and to advance strategies for mobilizing forests to help achieve the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

“We’re losing forests across the tropics too quickly, mostly due the production of beef, palm oil, soy and wood products–not to mention forest fires,” said Crystal Davis, Director of Global Forest Watch. “But now, we have an arsenal of cutting-edge technologies that help identify where and when forests are being destroyed. Illegal loggers chopping down protected trees, agriculture companies breaking zero-deforestation commitments, palm oil producers setting fire to peatlands and other players behind forest destruction can no longer hide.”

Advances in satellite-based remote sensing and other technologies that have emerged in recent years provide speedy, low-cost methods to map and monitor forests. The researchers point to several key technical improvements: satellite data has become more detailed, enabling the tracking of more subtle changes–such as the sudden appearance of roads or farm plots in protected forests. Some of the satellites can even “see” through cloud cover, smoke and haze, enabling forest monitoring in the midst of forest fires or other weather events. Cheaper computing costs and innovations in artificial intelligence mean researchers can process satellite imagery over large areas automatically using advanced algorithms — including to estimate forest loss for the entire world.

“In the past, countries compiled statistics on forests from expensive and time-consuming field missions,” said Petersen. “While it’s still important to have ‘boots on the ground,’ in the battle to save forests, we increasingly rely on ‘eyes in the sky’ to give us a comprehensive picture of where forests are located and how they are changing.”

For example, it is often too dangerous or expensive to track illegal activity on the ground. These new technologies are helping governments and NGOs crack down on forest crimes, sometimes for the first time. Satellite images, when combined with additional data like national park boundaries or logging permits, are especially useful in providing “early warnings” of ongoing illegal activity, such as the building of a road, enabling law enforcement to swoop in investigate before activity spreads.

• In 2004, Brazil developed the first national early warning system, called DETER, to target illegal logging and the illegal clearing of land for agriculture. The national environmental enforcement agency (IBAMA) uses DETER to determine which field investigations they should undertake and how best to implement national laws and policies. Peru and Colombia are developing similar systems for cracking down on illegal deforestation.

• The Peruvian Ministry of Environment (MINAM) distributes weekly forest disturbance alerts via their online portal Geobosques to over 800 subscribers from government, civil society and the private sector. The alerts help Peruvian authorities to identify, halt, and prosecute cases of illegal logging and mining.

• In Uganda, the Jane Goodall Institute trained monitors at Uganda’s National Forest Authority (NFA) and park rangers with Uganda Wildlife Authority (UWA) to use weekly forest disturbance alerts to monitor national parks and forests. NFA and UWA staff now use those alerts and other data to prioritize patrols, find and document illegal forest clearing. These data have led to prosecutions, fines, and investigations within several critical habitats, including Kibale National Park.

Satellite data, the paper says, is also critical for consistently measuring progress on the protection of forests and quantifying how much carbon is stored in trees, a prerequisite for programs like REDD+ that reward forest nations for keeping trees standing. These forest monitoring technologies also offer a cheap, consistent, and reliable way to track progress on commitments by governments and companies to protect forests.

• To meet Paris Agreement goals, for example, countries must “inventory” their greenhouse gas emissions, which would require the calculation of forest loss (which emits carbon) and forest gain (which absorbs carbon).

• Measuring the success of such pledges as the New York Declaration on forests, which aims to halve deforestation by 2020, end it completely by 2030, and restore hundreds of millions of acres of degraded land together with the Bonn Challenge) necessitates the close monitoring of forest re-growth.

• To be eligible for REDD+ payments, countries must devise national forest monitoring systems to track progress in reducing deforestation and forest degradation against an agreed baseline.

• Finally, the more than 400 companies that have made pledges to get deforestation out of their commodity supply chains can’t be held accountable for implementing their commitments without accurate forest data.

Thanks to REDD+ readiness funding, many countries have improved their ability to monitor their forests, how much carbon they store, and how they are changing. However, the paper suggests that despite this skyrocketing demand for better forest data, there is a gap between what new technologies make possible and what is still practiced by national officials monitoring forests. Despite significant investments by international donors, tropical forest government agencies often do not have the staff, financial resources, or computing infrastructure to take advantage of rapidly advancing technology.

“Forest nations are increasingly attuned to the importance of saving tropical forests, which not only store carbon, but also provide clean air, fresh water, food, medicines, incomes, and a wealth of plant and animal life,” said Martin Herold, professor of Geo-Information Science and Remote Sensing at Wageningen University. “In the hands of the officials who need them most, these forest monitoring tools could make or break the global fight to save our forests. We should focus our efforts not just on improving the technology, but more importantly, on supporting government institutions to adopt it and apply it to their biggest challenges moving forward.”

“We will soon be able to detect deforestation every day in high resolution from space. But it won’t do any good if the knowledge stays in research labs or academic publications. Park rangers, law enforcement officers, and indigenous peoples need to act on this information. While technology continues to improve, we should invest greater resources on building the capacity to own this information and incentives to support data-based decision making,” Petersen added.

At the same time, forest monitoring efforts carried out by non-government organizations and posted online, can help citizens access forest data when national governments don’t share their numbers. Indigenous people, for example, seeking to claim rights to their forests to protect them from destruction, increasingly complement their forest monitoring efforts at the local level–using drones, GPS and mobile phones–with satellite data.

The paper cautions, however, that that the rapidly expanding options for monitoring forests poses a new set of challenges. As forest-measuring tools proliferate, varying factors, such as the definition of a forest, the time frame measured or the quality of the data, can lead to conflicting estimates of the deforestation rates, and a lack of comparability across countries. The authors call for a more systematic understanding of how and why country-reported data differ from independent estimates, and suggest that greater guidance is needed for countries to take advantage of recent technological developments and minimize confusion.

“Forest monitoring technology alone won’t save forests,” said Frances Seymour, Program Chair of the Oslo Tropical Forests Forum and lead author of Why Forests? Why Now? “But increased transparency is a critical enabling tool for many of the most promising strategies for stopping deforestation, including enhanced law enforcement, REDD+ financial incentives, and efforts to get deforestation out of commodity supply chains.”

An emerging body of research on the non-carbon impacts of deforestation reveals that destroying tropical forests significantly alters the Earth’s delicate energy balance, rainfall, and wind systems, leading to warmer and drier conditions near cleared forests and out-of-whack weather patterns across the globe, according to a new report by leading forest experts to be released at a major global forest gathering today. The research suggests these “new” impacts of deforestation, rooted in the flow of solar energy through forests across the upper atmosphere, disruptions to the atmosphere’s chemical cocktail, and dramatic declines in water cycling are just as damaging to the climate as the carbon released into the atmosphere when trees are cut down.

“We’ve known for a long time that chopping down tropical forests spews dangerous amounts of carbon into the atmosphere,” said Nancy Harris, Research Manager of the Forests program at the World Resources Institute and working paper co-author.. “Now we are learning that removing trees from the earth’s surface also throws off the energy, water and chemical balances that make it possible for us to grow food and live our lives in predictable and productive ways. If we continue to cut down trees, we’ll have to rewrite what we know about the weather—and we can forget about global goals to keep temperature rise below 1.5 degrees Celsius.”

The working paper, “Tropical Forests and Climate Change: The Latest Science,” is one of nine studies released today at the opening of the two-day Oslo Tropical Forest Forum, an event hosted by the Norwegian government to celebrate results and identify remaining challenges 10 years after reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) was included in the climate change negotiations, and to advance strategies for mobilizing forests to help achieve the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals.

The working paper synthesizes findings from a slew of recent studies that, when they come together, conclude that large-scale forest loss in any of the three major tropical forest zones— Latin America, Southeast Asia and Central Africa—would lead to a rise in local temperatures, and disruptions to the water cycle locally and half a world away. These studies use sophisticated modeling to determine the physical, chemical and reflective impacts of removing forests from the surface of the earth en masse, and satellites to measure the changes that have already happened.   “When you add up these impacts of forest loss, one thing is clear: people living closest to deforested areas face a hotter, drier reality,” said Harris. “These changes won’t hit Brazilians, Indonesians, or Congolese sometime in the future—they are hitting them now, and they’ll only get worse as more forests disappear.”

Areas in the tropics that experienced deforestation in the last decade have seen significant and long-lasting increases in local air surface temperatures. “Observed local temperature impacts of deforestation are in one direction: hotter,” said Michael Wolosin, Forest Climate Analytics’ President and working paper co-author. “Daily average temperatures went up by a degree, and maximum temperatures by 2 degrees C, in just a decade. Over the same period, the global carbon and GHG impact was less than one fifth as much – 0.2 degrees C. Deforestation is wreaking havoc on local climates across the tropics.”

The Amazon region of South America, home of the world’s largest rainforest, would feel the most heat and drought from forest loss. Complete deforestation would lead to regional warming of about two degrees Celsius and a roughly 15 percent drop in annual rainfall.Researchers have already linked the 2015 drought that hit Brazil, impacting people, crops and industry, to forest loss in the Amazon.

“In its focus on ending greenhouse gas emissions, the Paris Agreement only takes the first step in addressing the drastic consequences of deforestation on the climate,” saidWolosin. “If global and national policymakers fail to come up with an action plan for staving off the immediate and debilitating impact of deforestation on local and global weather patterns, they could put the lives of millions in peril. The question is, what’s more important – the short-term income generated from fields after fields of soy or palm oil, or a stable, predictable weather patterns for generations to come?”

Tropical forests drive the global movement of air, water, and heat in diverse ways, leading to profound impacts on the climate. Through the process of evapotranspiration, trees pump water from their roots through their leaves as water vapor, humidifying the air and causing surface cooling. Because forests have more leaf surface area and deeper roots than grasslands or croplands, they cycle more water. The water pumped through a single tree can cause local surface cooling equivalent to 70 kWh for every 100 liters, enough energy to power two household central air-conditioners per day. Removing these trees can lead to local flooding, soil erosion and droughts.

Impacts from these tropical forest cover changes on water and heat cycling extend well beyond the tropical regions themselves through “teleconnections”, associated with the mass movement of air and conditions in the upper atmosphere. An increase in temperature in the tropics due to deforestation generates large upward-moving air masses. When these hit the upper atmosphere they cause ripples, or teleconnections, that flow outward in various directions, similar to the way an underwater earthquake can create a tsunami.

According to one landmark study about this phenomenon, complete deforestation could put the climate in some of the world’s most important agriculture regions off kilter. These variations in rainfall and spikes in temperature could occur across the world. For example, complete deforestation of the Amazon Basin would likely reduce rainfall in the US Midwest, Northwest and parts of the south during the agricultural season. The complete deforestation of Central Africa would likely cause declines in rainfall in the Gulf of Mexico and parts of the US Midwest and Northwest and increase it on the Arabian Peninsula. There could also be precipitation declines in Ukraine and Southern Europe.

“Halting deforestation, allowing damaged forests to grow back, and keeping undisturbed forests intact, are necessary to ensure the stability of the climate” said Frances Seymour, Program Chair of the Oslo Tropical Forests Forum and lead author of Why Forests? Why Now?. “Fortunately, we know a lot about ways to stop deforestation, but developing countries can’t do this alone. Donor countries should ramp up funding of efforts by tropical forest nations to halt deforestation, and address the global consumption, trade and investment patterns that drive forest loss.”

In advance of the Global Climate Action Summit (September 12-14, San Francisco) and the United Nations Climate Change conference (December 3-14, Katowice, Poland), the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum (June 27-28) will shine the global climate spotlight on the role forests play in achieving Paris Agreement goals to keep global temperatures well below 2 degrees Celsius. Protecting, restoring and managing trees could get the world one-third closer to preventing the worst impacts of climate change. Yet, the world’s forests—especially tropical forests in Latin America, Southeast Asia and Central Africa—are increasingly under threat from the ever-expanding production of soy, cattle, palm oil and wood products. Recent research is revealing that climate change itself is emerging as an increased threat to forests—and that forests provide climate benefits beyond carbon that we’re only just starting to understand. In addition, forests contribute to a wide range of Sustainable Development Goals, including access to clean water and clean energy.

WHO:
The Oslo Tropical Forest Forum is hosted by the Norwegian Ministry of Climate and Environment and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation.

Confirmed speakers include:

• Erik Solheim, Executive Director, United Nations Environment and former Minister of Development and Environment, Norway
• HE Luis Gilberto Murillo, Minister of Environment and Sustainable Development, Colombia
• HE Tarsicio Granizo, Minister of Environment, Ecuador
• HE Henri Yav Mulang, Minister of Finance, DRC
• HE Ola Elvestuen, Minister for Climate and the Environment, Norway
• HE Fabiola Muñoz, Minister of Environment, Peru
• Dr. Putera Parthama, Director General for Climate Change, Ministry of Environment and Forestry, Indonesia
• Victoria Tauli-Corpuz, UN Special Rapporteur on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, Philippines
• Henry Waxman, Waxman Strategies, and former Member, US Congress, United States
• Carlos Nobre, Global Climate Change Expert and Senior Fellow, WRI-Brasil
• Rukka Sombolinggi, Secretary General, Indigenous Peoples Alliance of the Archipelago (AMAN), Indonesia
• Tasso Azevedo, Consultant and Social Entrepreneur, Former First Chief and Director General of the Brazilian Forest Service, Brazil
• Carine Smith Ihenacho, Chief Corporate Governance Officer, Norges Bank Investment Management, Norway
• Svein Holsether, CEO Yara, Norway
• Anderson Tanoto, Director RGE Pte Ltd, Singapore
• Frances Seymour, Distinguished Senior Fellow, World Resources Institute, United States

WHAT:
An invitation-only bi-annual event hosted by the Government of Norway. The goal of the gathering is to celebrate results and identify remaining challenges 10 years after reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation (REDD+) was included in the climate change negotiations, and to advance strategies for mobilizing forests to help us achieve the ambitions of the Paris Agreement and the Sustainable Development Goals. A strong global alliance for tropical forests has emerged in these last 10 years, and many of its representatives will attend the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum.