The world’s proponents for forests as a key component of global climate action responded to the UNSG’s call to action with nearly a year of intense discussions, negotiations, and organizing.
Ultimately, this process led to the New York Declara- tion on Forests (NYDF), a public-private partnership of companies, governments, civil society, and Indigenous Peoples pledging to do their part to achieve 10 ambitious global goals: halving forest loss by 2020 and ending it by 2030; meeting the private sector goal of getting deforestation out of agricultural commodities by 2020; restoring 150 million hectares of forests and degraded lands by 2020 and another 200 million by 2030; and more.

Land clearing for agriculture has been linked to a higher incidence of various vector-borne diseases, and the COVID-19 pandemic has increased scrutiny of how forest disturbance can increase the risk of transmission of zoonotic viruses. The Harvard-based Scientific Task Force for Preventing Pandemics at the Source (PPATS) identified forest conservation as a key response to reducing that risk (Alimi et al. 2021).

Forests have significant—and overwhelmingly positive—effects on climate stability through biophysical processes that affect transfers of energy and moisture in the atmosphere, contributing to food and water security, protecting human health, and enhancing our ability to adapt to a warming planet. Accounting for these processes can significantly affect estimates of the impacts of deforestation on the global climate based on their interaction with the carbon cycle alone, rendering the global cooling effect of avoiding tropical deforestation as much as 50 percent greater.

Removal of forest cover, especially in the tropics, increases local temperatures and disrupts rainfall patterns in ways that compound the local effects of global climate change, threatening severe consequences for human health and agricultural productivity. By failing to take these biophysical effects into account, current policies systematically undervalue forests’ climate services, fail to anticipate the full range of climate risks associated with deforestation, and result in inequitable allocation of responsibilities and resources within and between nations.


Box 2.1 Accounting for Emissions and Removals from Land
To understand the carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) emissions and removals from land use and land-use change, scientists
divide land into six categories based on the predominant “use” or state of the land (e.g., forest land, cropland, grassland,
wetlands, settlements, and other land). Emissions of CO 2 , methane (CH4), and nitrous oxide (N2O) are estimated from
a range of sources, including agriculture. Setting aside agriculture, the rest, forestry and other land use (or FOLU,
which is added to agriculture as AFOLU) is then further subdivided.

Emissions or removals over a period of time from land that is in the same category at the beginning and end is calculated (these are collectively called “land-use” emissions), and then from land that has shifted from one category to another (“land-use change” emissions and removals). The emissions and removals from “land converted to forests” and “forests remaining forests” are calculated separately as “forestry,” which takes into account large carbon flows when land is still considered to be “forest” even when completely cleared of trees, and the complexities arising from timing of emissions that depend on the end use of harvested wood (e.g., carbon from biomass burned for energy enters the atmosphere almost immediately, while timber used in buildings does not). Together, these categories— previously identified as land use, land-use change, and forestry (or LULUCF)—are now identified as FOLU emissions and removals.

If we look more closely at just those parts of FOLU emissions that are related to forest processes (Figure B2.1), “Forestry”
emissions (from forests remaining forests) include uptake of carbon from the atmosphere as forests grow, and carbon
release from tree mortality, biomass burning, and the eventual breakdown or disposal of harvested wood products
(HWPs). When land use changes from nonforest to forest through active reforestation or more passive regeneration,
the primary impact is slow and steady carbon uptake for decades. Land-use change in the other direction—from forest
to nonforest, is deforestation—with large immediate “pulse”releases of carbon from biomass that burns or breaks down
quickly, and slower “committed” releases from HWPs, soil organic matter loss, and biomass breakdown.

page 33- On top of this background process of land helping reduce atmospheric carbon are overlaid changes in humans’ land use that cause the release of carbon in the opposite direction. Humans have been expanding our footprint across the earth's surface—human use directly affects more than 70 percent of global land, with one-third of land’s potential production used for food, feed, fiber, timber, and energy (IPCC 2019b). Box 2.1 describes the accounting system used for these land-based emissions and removals.

Policymakers should urgently recognize and address the full range of forests’ climate regulation services through institutions operating at relevant scales, including the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), institutions for regional cooperation, and domestic agencies charged with promoting agricultural productivity and protecting public health. Illustrative policy directions include the following:

▪ Integrating the direct effects of forest loss on agricultural productivity into the agriculture sector and local land-use planning
▪ Drawing agricultural producers into REDD+ processes in ways that emphasize their roles as beneficiaries of the local
climate stability afforded by forest cover
▪ Considering forest protection as a public health intervention to reduce the risk of rural heat stress (as well as the risk of pandemics)
▪ Taking deforestation-induced rural heat stress into account in worker safety regulations
▪ Integrating the temperature effects of deforestation on agriculture and human health into climate adaptation planning