Can saving forests help feed the world?

Mongabay.com is partnering with the Skoll Foundation ahead of the Skoll World Forum on Social Entrepreneurship to bring a series of perspectives that aim to answer the question: how do we feed the world and still address the drivers of deforestation?

As world population climbs from 7 to a projected 9 billion people and emerging and developing economies demand ever more of the food and fiber that drive deforestation, many environmentalists ask with increasing urgency whether and how tropical forests can survive. But the question may actually be whether and how the world’s increasing, and increasingly rich, population can be fed unless tropical forests survive.



Science has long warned that agricultural output is vulnerable to climate change. Under gradually increasing temperatures, however, many hypothesized that production would decline in some places while rising in others. But extreme weather – like the heat wave in Russia in 2010, last summer’s drought and wildfires in the US and the multi-year drought in Australia – hurts farming everywhere. If, as appears increasingly likely under business-as-usual emissions trajectories, extreme weather becomes the new normal, the world’s food supply could be the big loser.

Putting total global greenhouse gas pollution on a fast and steady downward trend may be the only way to avoid serious risk of catastrophic disruption of world food supplies. Tropical deforestation and agriculture together account for about a quarter of GHG emissions in approximately equal proportions. In addition, tropical forests hold some 300 billion tons of carbon. If a big part of this were to go into the atmosphere quickly – should climate change and deforestation-induced drought and runaway fires cause Amazon dieback, for example – this alone could push extreme weather into the realm of the unmanageable. Recent modeling, and research on fire effects in forests suggest that this is an all-too-real possibility. But saving the forest can help feed the world and vice versa.



“To make sure that the deforestation reductions last and do not simply result in emissions shifting to other places, countries or states should show that their deforestation is going down while agriculture production continues or goes up.”

Steve Schwartzman Director, Tropical Forest Policy, Environmental Defense Fund Steve Schwartzman is Director of Tropical Forest Policy at the Environmental Defense Fund. He leads EDF’s work on tropical forests and economic incentives for large-scale forest protection. For more than 20 years, Steve has worked in the Brazilian Amazon with indigenous and traditional communities, governments, scientists and the private sector to slow deforestation and protect forests. EDF’s Brazilian partners have contributed significantly to Brazil’s dramatic success in reducing Amazon deforestation and establishing ambitious national emissions reduction targets. An anthropologist, Steve lived with the Panará people in the Brazilian Amazon for a year and a half and learned their language. His areas of expertise include tropical forests, Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation (REDD), Brazil and the Amazon, indigenous peoples and incentives for environmental protection.

The principle is simple – big emitters cap their emissions, put a price on carbon, and meet part of their targets by buying emissions reductions from tropical states or countries that cap their deforestation emissions and that show that they’ve made their reductions targets with robust remote-sensing and field-based measurements. To make sure that the deforestation reductions last and do not simply result in emissions shifting to other places, countries or states should show that their deforestation is going down while agriculture production continues or goes up. Carbon markets – in California, Canadian provinces, Australia, South Korea, the EU, potentially Brazil and other tropical countries as well – can also credit reductions from the adoption of low-carbon agriculture and the restoration of degraded lands (which in Brazil alone cover tens of millions of hectares). For example, there is large potential to increase the productivity of cattle ranching that can increase beef production while reducing pressure to expand into forest areas and keeping emissions of methane, a highly potent greenhouse gas, in check.



Brazil and Amazon states are showing how this can work. Brazil has committed to reducing its Amazon-wide deforestation 80% below the historical (1996 – 2005) average by 2020. It has already reduced more than 70%, or about 2 billion tons, since 2005. And agriculture production has gone up over the same time period, as farmers produce more on less land, and stop clearing new forest. So far, a combination of better law enforcement, credit restrictions on scofflaws, new forest reserves and indigenous territories, and consumer campaigns against deforestation in supply chains, helped by low commodity prices, have held deforestation down. Norway has also committed $1 billion to Brazil’s Amazon Fund if Brazil continues to make its target. But Brazil’s original plan to stop deforestation called for positive incentives for farmers to reduce deforestation. These have not materialized, and the agriculture lobby has pushed back, loosening legal restrictions on forest clearing. We can only sustain and build on climate progress in Brazil — and ultimately, guarantee that the 300 billion tons of carbon in the world’s tropical forest are part of the solution to climate change and feeding the world, rather than part of the problem–if skeptics get proof that emissions reductions from deforestation will pay. Pricing greenhouse gas reductions from forests and other land-based activities within existing and emerging carbon markets can provide the incentives to keep forests standing, protect the climate, and drive the transformation to sustainable, low carbon, high-productivity agriculture in the tropics.

To discuss this commentary, please visit Can Saving Forests Help Feed the World?

Editor’s note: The opinions expressed in this op-ed do not necessarily reflect the views of Mongabay.com or its staff. Mongabay founder, president, and editor Rhett A. Butler served as an advisor to the Skoll Foundation from 2010-2012.

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