Without healthy, thriving forests, planet Earth cannot sustain life. As much as eighty per cent of the world’s forests have been degraded or destroyed. The destruction of forests is responsible for up to a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than every plane, car, truck, ship and train on the planet combined.
Photo: Greenpeace
Greenpeace reports these facts and many others as part of its worldwide campaign for zero deforestation by 2020 to protect what is left of these extraordinary ecosystems.
Two Thirds of World’s Land Species Live in Forests
Evolving over millennia, tropical forests are one of the greatest storehouses of nature’s diversity on Earth; of all of the world’s land species, around two thirds live in forests, Greenpeace informs, adding that many of these rare creatures – orang-utans, tigers, jaguars, forest elephants and rhinos – are increasingly threatened by extinction.
“But the importance of forests stretches far beyond their own boundaries. Forests help to regulate the Earth’s climate because they store nearly 300 billion tonnes of carbon in their living parts – roughly 40 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
Forests Regulate Water Flow, Rainfall
When they’re destroyed through logging or burning, this carbon is released into the atmosphere as the climate changing greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. “The destruction of forests is responsible for up to a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than every plane, car, truck, ship and train on the planet combined.”
Greenpeace informs that forests also regulate water flow and rainfall so we depend on them to grow our crops and food. The loss of forest in one part of the world can have severe impacts in another; forest loss in Amazonia and Central Africa can severely reduce rainfall in the USA Midwest, for example.
With so many of the world’s forests already destroyed, we urgently need to protect what is left.
“Yet industry is still relentlessly converting forests into disposable products that end up in our shopping baskets – while pushing species to the brink of extinction, destroying the lives and livelihoods of forest communities and exacerbating global climate change.”
The Zero Deforestation Campaign
Greenpeace is campaigning for zero deforestation, globally, by 2020.
“To achieve this, we challenge destructive industries to change their practices, and we inspire consumer action to demand that our food, paper and timber products aren’t linked to forest destruction,” it informs.
We lobby political power holders to take the co-ordinated international and local political action that’s needed to protect the world’s forests, the rights of the people who depend on them, biodiversity and the climate.
Indigenous Communities, Multinational Giants
“We work alongside indigenous communities at the frontline of forest destruction – in the Amazon, the Congo, Indonesia – to investigate, document, expose and take action against forest destruction”. With the help of hundreds of thousands of supporters, we’ve won some amazing victories, Greenpeace reports.
According to Greenpeace, “Deforestation of the Amazon for soya and beef has significantly reduced due to the soya and cattle moratoria, the Great Bear Rainforest in Canada has been protected and is being sustainably managed, 80,000 hectares of northern Finnish reindeer grazing forests have been protected, and, thanks to pressure from our supporters, multinational giants like Nestlé and Unilever have changed their palm oil sourcing policies to help protect Indonesia’s rainforests and peatlands.”
In recent years, the possibility of a global political framework to reduce emissions from deforestation and degradation (REDD) has moved firmly onto the international political agenda.
Greenpeace is campaigning for the right deal – which, if achieved, could benefit biodiversity, people and the climate as well protecting the world’s forests.
“But, in the minute it has taken you to read this page, a forest area the size of 35 football pitches has been destroyed. Our Earth’s extraordinary and irreplaceable forests need to be protected, urgently.”
*To follow and join Greenpeace Zero Deforestation campaign, go here.
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