Earth Today | A nod to trees for Earth Day 2024
WHILE THE focus for this year’s Earth Day celebrations was on the elimination of plastics pollution, Jamaica’s Forestry Department and its partners made it their mission to plant trees.
The agency has been engaged in ongoing efforts to improve the island’s forest cover at a time when globally, trees and forests as a critical part of the response to the climate crisis and nature loss is being championed.
Their efforts have been validated by the 2022 State of the World’s Forests Report of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO). That report has called on stakeholders globally to pursue three pathways to resilience that involve forests and trees and which augurs well for humanity.
The goal, it said, is to enable “societies, communities and individual landowners, users and managers to derive more tangible value from forests and trees while addressing environmental degradation, recovering from crises, preventing future pandemics, increasing resilience and transforming economies”.
Included among the pathways is halting deforestation and maintaining forests to avoid the emission of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, that fuel climate change and trigger impacts, such as extreme hurricanes and droughts.
It also includes realising some “14 per cent of what is needed up to 2030 to keep planetary warming below 1.5 degrees Celsius, while safeguarding more than half the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity”, the report said.
The 1.5 goal has long been lobbied for by Caribbean and other small island developing states that are among the most vulnerable to climate change impacts, which extend beyond warming, sea level rise and extreme weather events to impaired public health, undermined livelihoods and compromised economies.
The 1.5 goal is also captured in the Paris Agreement, which recognises that “holding the increase in the global average temperature to well below two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels” would “significantly reduce the risks and impacts of climate change”.
Also advocated by the 2022 FAO report is the restoration of degraded lands and the expansion of agroforestry.
“1.5 billion hectares of degraded land would benefit from restoration, and increasing tree cover could boost agricultural productivity on another one billion hectares,” the FAO report said, adding that such a move would also see the removal of a significant percentage of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year up to 2050.
The other identified pathway is the sustainable use of forests and the creation of green value chains to help to satisfy “future demand for materials – with global consumption of all natural resources expected to more than double from 92 billion tonnes in 2017 to 190 billion tonnes in 2060 – and underpin sustainable economies”.
“The three pathways are mutually reinforcing. When synergies are maximised, the pathways can provide some of the highest returns in the form of climate and environmental benefits while also enhancing local sustainable development potential, adaptive capacity and resilience,” the FAO report maintained.
To get there, it has prescribed, among other things, policy shifts that divert financial flows away from actions that harm forests and to incentivised investments in “conservation, restoration and sustainable use”.
Also important, it said, is brokering and sustaining partnerships.
“Companies in forest-based value chains will be essential partners in the development of circular economies. Many are already expanding the range of forest products as substitutes for materials with higher greenhouse-gas emissions and increasing processing efficiency. Local forest growers and processors can obtain more benefit by strengthening links with buyers and developing capacity through producer organisations,” the report revealed.
Meanwhile, here in Jamaica, stakeholders used Earth Day 2024 to do their bit to progress the growth of trees and the preservation of forests as the Forestry Department partnered with volunteers from the Sandals Foundation and the Jamaica Fire Brigade on the reforestation project in the Bogue 2 Forest Reserve in St Ann.