Eight Latin American countries have pledged to combat deforestation and restore an area of land twice the size of Britain by 2020. The move is part of a global plan to plant hundreds of millions of trees and save over 1bn tonnes of CO2 a year.
Much of the land to be replanted and improved in Peru, Mexico, Colombia, Guatemala, Ecuador, Chile, Argentina and Costa Rica, has been deforested in the past 15 years and is now used for subsistence farming or is unusable after being intensively farmed. But it will be restored either as natural forests, or as “agro-forestry” which mixes trees with crop lands and “silvo-pasture” which combines trees with animals.
According to the World Resources Institute (WRI), one of five research groups working with business and government on the ‘Initiative 20×20’, of the 4.2 gigatonnes of greenhouse gases emitted by Latin American and Caribbean countries in 2012, nearly half were from agriculture and the loss of forests. Between 2001 and 2012, the region lost 36m hectares of forest and grassland to agricultural expansion. Cutting down forests to make way for ranches releases carbon.
The project, announced on Monday in Lima at the UN climate summit, hopes to restore about 20m hectares of degraded land — an area larger than Uruguay. A separate, ambitious plan to restore tens of millions of hectares of degraded land in Brazil, the largest Latin American country, is expected to be announced next year. Latin America is estimated to have over 200m hectares of degraded land.
About 13m hectares of forests are lost each year but restoring degraded forest lands around the world is now regarded as one of the surest ways to reduce climate change emissions as well as to improve farming and eliminate poverty. The global initiative, known as the Bonn Challenge, started in 2011 as a German plan which was extended at UN secretary general Ban Ki-moon’s New York climate summit in September 2014.
More on: www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/dec/08/lima-climate-talks-pledge-to-plant-20m-hectares-of-trees
