The climate change debate offers a way to integrate forest management into development policy, but strategies must be informed by good science.

Conservationists have long recognised the role of forests in supporting indigenous people’s livelihoods in developing countries. In addition to fuel and building material, forests often provide critical supplies of food and medicine. They are also an important source of ever-dwindling biodiversity. In Africa, researchers estimate that more than 70 per cent of people depend on forest resources.

More recently, cash-strapped governments have grown interested in the idea of being paid to conserve forests because of the ‘ecosystem services’ they provide, such as moderating local air temperature; controlling water flow and mitigating floods; and generating rainfall.

But forests are now being propelled into the spotlight for another value: their ability to store carbon and mitigate climate change.

Forests act as carbon sinks – trees and soil absorb carbon from the atmosphere and store it away. If left intact, such forests could play a crucial role in offsetting carbon emissions.

But many tropical forests are being rapidly cleared by logging or to make way for agriculture, releasing the carbon stored in them either rapidly if they are burnt, or more slowly as the organic matter decays.

Deforestation can also change soil dynamics and increase erosion, both of which can release more carbon into the atmosphere. Overall, researchers estimate that deforestation emits around one fifth of global carbon emissions.

Any effort to tackle climate change in the long term must therefore involve reducing deforestation.

Link to image: Clean Economy

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