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Glasgow showed that the world is waking up to the importance of tropical forests both to address the nature crisis and to “keep 1.5C within reach”. A big thanks and congrats to our UK friends for doing a tremendous job in placing forests and nature at the top of the climate agenda in a way it has never been before!
Our new Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre and new Minister of Climate and Environment Espen Barth Eide both participated in the high-level session on forests and land use on Nov 2nd, and in a series of events and meetings to follow up on the announcements. Delivering on the ambition from Glasgow will take new and continued political will, finance, partnerships and hard work. Glasgow prepared the ground for exactly that.
In fact, we saw important progress across all of NICFI’s 7 strategic areas: Ambitious new land use policies from forest countries in the Glasgow Leaders Declaration and in individual commitments such as DRC’s landmark Letter of Intent with CAFI; unprecedented funding and attention around the rights of indigenous peoples; breakthrough on carbon markets through LEAF and greatly increased forest finance from donors. We saw strengthened efforts to reduce the pressure on tropical forests through new commitments from commodity traders and meatpackers; the inclusion of deforestation risk in climate risk frameworks; a large new investor coalition to eliminate deforestation from portfolios within four years, and the agreement between China and the United States to “engage collaboratively in support of eliminating global illegal deforestation through effectively enforcing their respective laws on banning illegal imports”.
And in the aftermath of the climate summit, the European Commission proposed to regulate commodities and products associated with deforestation on the European market.
In other words – momentum keeps building, but also a long to-do list ahead.
On behalf of the NICFI team I look forward to engaging with you all to deliver on our pledges, and hopefully to be able to invite many of you to attend the Oslo Tropical Forest Forum in person in June 2022.
Best wishes,
Andreas Dahl-Jørgensen
Director, Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative