At the Glasgow climate summit a year ago, 145 nations agreed to reverse forest loss and land degradation by the end of the decade as part of a strategy to slow global warming. The rate of deforestation has slowed modestly, to an area the size of Ireland, but not enough to meet the 2030 target, said the Forest Declaration Assessment released on Monday.
“Multiple streams of data show that the world is not on track to achieve our commitments to protect forests,” said David Gibbs of World Resources Institute, one of the groups involved in the report. “We are quickly moving toward another round of hollow commitments and vanished forests.” The green groups said government mandates were more effective than reliance on voluntary action.
Only a quarter of major global companies in the agriculture sector have announced clear policies to eliminate deforestation from their supply chains, and only one-fifth of those companies — 5 percent of the overall total — were close to meeting their goals, said the assessment. The mining sector was “significantly behind the agriculture sector.”
Some 6.8 million hectares, or more than 26,000 square miles, of forest were lost in 2021, a decline of 6.3 percent from the previous year, said the assessment. Tropical Asia was on track to meet the 2030 target, largely due to progress in Indonesia and Malaysia, but no other region was. Tropical Africa and Latin America have reduced forest losses but not enough to satisfy the 2030 goal.