World Wildlife Fund

Building resilience to climate change impacts

Drought, Mangrove in parched land, French Guiana.
© WWF-Canon / Roger LeGUEN

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that at least a third of the world’s remaining forests may be adversely affected by changing climate. Rising temperatures make forests drier, more susceptible to fires, and vulnerable to pests and disease.

Forests also store much of the world’s carbon. The Earth’s vegetation and soils currently contain the equivalent of approximately 7,500 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide – that is more carbon than is contained in all the remaining oil stocks on the planet and more than double the total amount of carbon currently in the atmosphere.  

Aerial view of a logging mill near Apiacás, Mato Grosso state. Juruena National Park, Brazil.
© WWF / Zig KOCH

How forest contribute to climate change
Forests are destroyed or degraded by activities such as logging and conversion of forest to agricultural land. These activities release large quantities of carbon emissions and other greenhouse gases (GHG) into the atmosphere becoming a significant (for some developing countries, a primary) source of GHG emissions and a contributor to climate change.

Deforestation and degradation of our forests continue at an alarming rate.  We lose over 32 million acres of tropical forest each year - the equivalent to 36 football fields a minute. The potential for forests to become even greater sources of carbon emissions due to deforestation and degradation is massive.

Kerinci Seblat National Park Stream in the tropical rainforest Sumatra, Indonesia
© WWF-Canon / Mauri RAUTKARI

Reducing emissions from deforestation
While reforestation is important and helpful for supporting reduced emissions in many places, stopping deforestation and forest degradations is more urgent from a climate perspective.  It takes decades for a sapling to grow and absorb the amount of carbon that is released when a mature tree decays. Reducing deforestation and degradation is a highly cost-effective way of reducing GHG – one that can be done immediately if the drivers of deforestation are addressed strategically.  If done right, it can also benefit biodiversity conservation and people.

WWF believes it is necessary for the second phase of the Kyoto Protocol to include mechanisms that recognize and provide incentives for reducing emissions from deforestation (REDD), while ensuring that REDD-related emissions are truly additional to industrial emission reductions.  WWF is supporting REDD activities in developing countries, including capacity building.  WWF is also developing high standards for REDD initiatives to ensure that they are sound and well-implemented, benefit local livelihoods, and respect the rights of indigenous people and other local communities.

Countries also need to develop national frameworks to tackle forest-based emissions.  There must be sufficient resources provided to address the drivers of deforestation.  Developed countries must help by providing resources, including technology transfer.  And provision must be made to ensure that as countries with high deforestation rates implement REDD initiatives, countries which up till now have low deforestation do not begin to cut their forests.  These countries should be given incentives to protect their forests as they are likely to face increasing pressure to deforest with the shrinking supply of forest products.

WWF has also initiated pilot projects in key regions of the world to better understand the impacts of climate change on ecosystems and test methods for managing forests to resist these impacts.