Although deforestation is responsible for one-fifth of global carbon emissions, international agreements designed to tackle climate change have so far avoided the issue. This is all set to change. The current climate change negotiations recognise that forests must be part of the solution to reducing emissions. And that reducing deforestation should benefit not just the climate, but also poor rural people and biodiversity conservation. This was the key message to come out of ‘Forest Day 2’, an event co-hosted by CIFOR at a UN climate change conference in Poland.

The first Forest Day was held in Bali, in 2007, at the 13th UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conference of the Parties (COP 13). Jointly organised by CIFOR and other members of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF), it attracted more than 800 people.

‘At Forest Day in Bali, we were arguing that forests had to be included in the climate change negotiations,’ says Markku Kanninen, who leads CIFOR’s climate research. ‘We also wanted the negotiators to recognise that measures to reduce deforestation should be designed in such a way that they benefit poor people.’

‘Protecting forests means fighting for the very survival of humanity.’

Yvo de Boer
UNFCCC Executive Secretary, at Forest Day 2

The Bali Action Plan acknowledged the importance of forests and initiated a 2-year consultation process expected to culminate in an agreement that will replace the Kyoto Protocol, which expires in 2012. Among other things, the agreement is likely to include measures to reduce emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, or REDD as it is known. Given that deforestation and forest degradation currently account for around 20 per cent of all global carbon emissions, REDD is about using financial incentives to conserve forests. Linking such schemes to a global carbon market, for example, could enable forest conservation to compete with the economic drivers of deforestation, which currently favour destructive logging practices and conversion of forest land to other uses. Financial flows, it is anticipated, will go from developed to developing countries.

The halfway point on the road to Copenhagen, where the post-Kyoto agreement will be finalised at COP 15, was COP 14, held in Poznań in December 2008. Forest Day 2, hosted by CIFOR, CPF and the Polish government, proved a good place to gauge how much progress had been made over the past year, not least in terms of gaining a better understanding of how REDD will work.

The opening plenary of Forest Day 2 was followed by four sessions which focused on a range of cross-cutting themes: the role of forests in adaptation to climate change; addressing forest degradation through sustainable forest management; capacity building for future REDD projects; and options for integrating REDD into the new global climate regime.

A summary of the key messages that came out of these sessions was delivered by Frances Seymour, CIFOR’s Director General, to Yvo de Boer, Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC. See http://www.cifor.cgiar.org/publications/pdf_files/cop/cop14/Summary-Forest-Day-2.pdf.

As well as the need for forests to be included in any future climate regime, this summary emphasised the need for any such regime to reflect the fact that forests are more than just carbon storehouses and, if properly designed, a new global climate agreement can deliver enormous co-benefits through forests. These co-benefits include poverty alleviation, biodiversity conservation and strengthening of human rights.

Other key messages included the importance of climate change adaptation, which has been poorly addressed in national strategies and international negotiations, and the need to effectively address forest degradation (‘the second D’), which in some parts of the world accounts for more carbon emissions than deforestation.

The feedback on Forest Day 2, both from partners and from those who attended the conference, was overwhelmingly positive.

‘Forest Day was a great forum for anybody like us who’s involved in the trade in forest carbon, and anyone who wants to learn more about how forests can contribute to climate change adaptation and mitigation,’ says Joanna Durbin of the Climate, Community and Biodiversity Alliance. The Alliance launched the latest edition of its standards at Forest Day, and it was one of almost 40 organisations that hosted a side event.

CIFOR also organised a regional Forest Day for Central Africa in April 2008. This event was held in Yaoundé, Cameroon, and it brought together researchers, non-governmental organisations, the private sector, forest communities and government officials. It helped to raise awareness about the role forests can play in mitigating climate change and the impact REDD projects could have on forests and forest-dwelling communities in Central Africa. See 'Central Africa gets its own Forest Day'

1. Official opening of Forest Day 2 in Poznań, Poland.
   Photograph courtesy of International Institute for Sustainable Development
2. CIFOR scientist Markku Kanninen interviewed during Forest Day 2. Photograph courtesy of International Institute for Sustainable Development

‘At Bali, the key thing was to get forests, and the idea of REDD, on to the climate change agenda. But it was always going to be more complicated in Poznań, as the key issue now is how to design REDD mechanisms.’

Markku Kanninen
CIFOR researcher