Category Archives: tropical rain forests

Bonn Challenge Takes First Steps

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rainforestThe Bonn Challenge is a global initiative to restore 150 million hectares of the world’s deforested and degraded lands by 2020, and 350 million by 2030. So far, 38 countries have pledged to restore 124.32 million hectares in order to achieve this goal. The challenge now is holding these nations to their commitments and ensuring the necessary financing mechanisms are in place to support their efforts.

A partnership of several organizations, including the Global Canopy Programme and Unlocking Forest Finance, has initiated three pilot programs in South America to test a landscape-focused approach. A landscape restoration project focuses on the drivers of deforestation – generally, agriculture and poverty – and works with local communities to manage land uses in a way that meets the needs of the community and the needs of the ecosystem as a whole.

The pilots focus on finding private investors to build disneypermanent markets for premium crops, rather than securing government and NGO grants, because these partnerships will be more permanent and sustainable than a government-sponsored program. For example, Walt Disney has partnered with local coffee farmers in San Martin, Peru to grow sustainably harvested coffee at a fair price for exclusive sale at Disney World. This guarantees the farmers a premium market that ensures their continued participation in the program.

In addition, today the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) announced the launching of its new website for tracking news, analysis, resources, and updates on forest landscape restoration projects around the world. The website so far provides detailed analysis on policies, successes, and failures in 42 different nations. It will also soon offer a “Bonn Challenge Barometer,” which will quantifiably track forest landscape restoration successes in support of the Bonn Challenge and provide resources to help address obstacles to progress.

… by side (event)

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The second of two fascinating and informative side events mentioned in my last post was hosted by the Global Canopy Programme, to launch its newest publication, The Little Book of Big Deforestation DriversIMG_4259 (which Alisha covered well here).  What caught my attention most was not the the research done to document and calculate the individual and cumulative supply chain impacts on climate change, but rather how to portray these results so that you want to learn more of these details. Can we, as individual consumers, augment national and international legal efforts to stop tropical rain forest deforestation, by making more informed buying decisions and thereby changing the deforestation catalysts embedded within the supply chain?  Take a look at the poster at right (I couldn’t help but think of Mara from the University of Montana, for she came to COP19 in part to learn how to communicate climate change impacts) and ask yourself:  how much forest did you eat today?