The COP26 climate negotiations in Glasgow yielded their first major deal yesterday: a commitment by more than 100 countries to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030. Forests have absorbed roughly 15% of global greenhouse gas emissions, so to cut carbon in the atmosphere, we must stop cutting down the world’s trees. But Julia Jones, a professor of conservation science at Bangor University, doubts this new plan is up to the task.
A similar declaration in New York in 2014 saw 200 countries and civil society groups pledge to halve deforestation by 2020. Instead, it rose by 41%. Jones argues that people living in and alongside forests do not receive enough support to manage them sustainably, to take up benign livelihoods or exclude those who destroy the ecosystem. World leaders do seem to be moving in the right direction though, Jones said. At least this time, Russia and Brazil – which
contain the vast Siberian Taiga and Amazon rainforest – signed up to the deal and there is now far more recognition of where earlier agreements went wrong.
US President Joe Biden brought another deal to the table in Glasgow: the Global Methane Pledge. This commits 90 countries (including Brazil but excluding China, India and Russia) to reducing emissions of methane – a potent greenhouse gas produced by livestock, oil and gas wells and landfill sites – by 30% in a decade. Michelle Caine, a visiting researcher at the University of Oxford who studies this gas in the atmosphere, was pleased but wary. A sense of triumph
around tackling methane emissions could, she said, “displace efforts away from the main driver of global warming – fossil CO₂ emissions.”
A recent study laid bare the gruesome consequences of failure on this front. If the world warms by 3°C this century, as two-thirds of senior climate scientists in a recent survey believed was likely, it could mean the chances of a major heatwave happening each year increasing by 75%, and the average risk of inland flooding doubling.
What are fossil fuel companies up to amid all this? Writing for our long-form series, Insights, Fredric Bauer and Tobias van Nielsen reveal how the oil industry is pouring money into cheap plastics, betting that as demand for fossil fuels for transport decreases, cheap oil-based plastics are only on the up.
We’ll bring you analysis from academics every day of the UN climate summit in Glasgow. You can follow all of our coverage here.
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