UN climate plans said too narrow to save forests

OSLO, (Reuters) – World efforts to slow deforestation  should do more to address underlying causes such as rising  demand for crops or biofuels, widening from a U.N. focus on  using trees to fight climate change, a study said yesterday.

It said a series of projects to protect forests had had  limited success in recent decades — U.N. figures show that 13  million hectares (32 million acres) of forest were lost every  year from 2000-09, an area equivalent to the size of Greece.

The report by the International Union of Forest Research  Organizations (IUFRO) suggested that the current U.N.-led  efforts to protect forests had too narrow a focus on promoting  trees as stores of carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas.

“Our findings suggest that disregarding the impact of  forests on sectors such as agriculture and energy will doom any  new international efforts whose goal is to conserve forests and  slow climate change,” said Jeremy Rayner, who chaired the IUFRO  panel and is a professor at the University of Saskatchewan.

Deforestation accounts for perhaps 10 percent of all  emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities. Trees soak  up carbon as they grow but release it when they burn or decay.

The IUFRO study said a key problem was that deforestation,  from the Amazon to the Congo, was often caused by economic  pressures far away. A popular global brand of cookies, for  instance, uses palm oil grown on deforested land in Indonesia.

IUFRO urged policies of “embracing complexity” to help  protect forests, including educating consumers, rather than rely  on a one-size-fits-all mechanism such as carbon storage.

It called for better efforts, for instance, to aid  indigenous peoples, whose livelihoods depend on healthy forests.

Among promising measures were amendments to the U.S. Lacey  Act, which makes it illegal to import wood known to come from  stolen timber. Brazil, for instance, has enacted procedures to  tackle deforestation in the Amazon, it said.

The IUFRO report will be issued at U.N. talks in New York  this week marking the start of the U.N.’s International Year of  Forests.

Almost 200 nations agreed at a meeting in Cancun, Mexico,  last month to step up efforts to protect forests with a plan  that aims to put a price on the carbon stored in trees, while  helping indigenous peoples and promoting sustainable use.