The economic values of primary tropical forests are global significant. Avoiding their loss and degradation is critical to meeting global climate, biodiversity, and social development goals.
Case study site: Global
Primary forests are spatially diverse terrestrial ecosystems with unique characteristics, being naturally regenerative and heterogeneous, which supports the stability of their carbon storage through the accumulation of live and dead biomass. Yet, little is known about the interactions between biomass stocks, tree genus diversity and structure across a temperate montane primary forest.
The uptake of carbon dioxide (CO2) by terrestrial ecosystems is critical for moderating climate change. To protect the carbon sink, land management policies are needed to limit deforestation, promote forest restoration and improve timber-harvesting practices.
Restoration of forest ecosystems by allowing continued growth of regenerating forests, active restoration measures, and re-connecting fragmented remnants across landscapes, will provide crucial mitigation benefits that contribute to emissions reduction targets as well as existing and future co-benefits.
Connectivity between conservation areas is vital for protecting and restoring biodiversity and ecosystems and can play a key role in supporting national responses to climate change, in Australia and around the world. Through a National Conservation Corridors Framework Australia could meet both climate and biodiversity outcomes and protect First Nations cultural heritage.
The ecological, social and economic values of forests are widely known and avoiding their loss and degradation has been recognized in national and international policy as critical for helping address the many global problems we face.
The need for integrated policy action to mitigate climate change and conserve biodiversity has now been recognised in Article 38 of the Glasgow Climate Pact. This emphasises the importance of protecting, conserving and restoring nature and ecosystems, including forests and other terrestrial and marine ecosystems.
Our planet’s forests provide many benefits to society’s continued well-being yet are subjected to ongoing loss and degradation. These activities provide financial benefits but unless we understand the value of what is lost when the forests are cleared and degraded, we will not be able to make informed decisions about their use and management.
Rules and guidelines that treat forests equally in key international policy frameworks regardless of their risk profiles limit their effectiveness and can facilitate forest degradation. Here we assess the potential for using a framework of ecosystem integrity to guide policy goals.
The recent shift towards using forest biomass burning for energy comes with grave risks of highly perverse outcomes, including increased CO2 emissions and negative impacts on forest ecosystem integrity.
Data from Europe shows that there has been a major increase in the intensification of logging in Europe over the past five to seven years and this could prevent many European nations reaching their emissions reduction targets under the Paris and Glasgow agreements. The same process is now being pushed heavily by certain forest industry lobbyists and government agencies in several Australian states, including Tasmania, Victoria and New South Wales.
Effective planning is a key pillar of landscape management, but there are limited tools for evaluating planning, especially where planning is informal or nascent. This paper outlines a novel and robust principles, criteria and indicators framework for evaluating planning in contexts where there is limited formal planning.
The number of studies on valuation of forest ecosystem services is increasing over time, but limited in covering important regions and forest types. The values are diverse in nature for different forest features and ecological zones. The economic value is greatest when the ecosystem services are considered together, instead of when individual extractive uses are used in insolation.
Economic studies published between 1990 and 2018 from primary forests around the world were reviewed to create a database of forest values. This database represents a ‘meta-analysis’ of the economic values of global forest ecosystem services in a readily comparable measure.
Historical forest disturbance have an impact on forest ecosystem co-benefits and trade-offs. Accounting for long-term variations of past disturbances can improve policies aimed at mitigating climate change and biodiversity loss.
This case study for the IUCN details the context, values, and threats to primary forests in the Angara region of Siberia, as well as recommended solutions and responses. This is one of several case studies submitted to the IUCN as part of the Primary Forests project.
Nature-based solutions provide opportunities for climate change mitigation, biodiversity conservation and ameliorating environmental degradation. But those opportunities are not materialising as current carbon accounting is deficient for use in evaluating them.
Integrated landscape approaches to forest management are more holistic than conventional sector-based approaches and provide a more promising approach to sustainable management. Integrity-based Forest Management (INFORM) provides a framework for developing and evaluating integrated landscape approaches built on ecosystem integrity, effective planning and strong governance.
Some have argued that against conserving forests, alleging that ‘managing’ forests, including for bioenergy, produces more climate mitigation than letting them grow. However, this conclusion is based on not counting emissions from burning biomass, and other carbon accounting sleight of hand.
This report has been prepared to review and assess definitions relating to primary forests; to collate and evaluate the datasets and methods currently available for measuring the extent of primary forests; and to provide options for defining, assessing and reporting on primary forests.
Integrated landscape management of forest landscapes requires ecosystem integrity, effective planning and strong governance. Integrated landscape approaches to forest management are more holistic than conventional sector-based approaches and provide a more promising approach to sustainable management.
The world’s contain irreplaceable biodiversity and are critical to the regulation of the global climate and maintaining stable carbon pools. Carbon-dense primary forests are found in every major forest biome and they typically support higher levels of biodiversity than logged forests, especially imperiled and endemic species, yet their value is not fully recognised in climate policy.
The climate change and biodiversity crises are intertwined. The loss of biodiversity reduces the resilience of both planet and people and narrows our response options for defeating climate change. Too often, though, biodiversity and climate change are dealt with in relative isolation by governments, intergovernmental processes, and other key actors and stakeholders.
Primary forests sequester more carbon, more safely than planted forests and offer far greater biodiversity benefits. We cannot resolve the climate or biodiversity crises without prioritising the protection of primary forests, argue members of the Primary Forests Task Force.
The micro-economics teams from Griffith University and Woods Hole Climate Research Center introduce how environmental economics can play a role in demonstrating – or quantifying (often in dollar terms) many forest values – and economics can also play a role in designing schemes that can help forest communities begin to capture the benefits provided by conservation efforts.
Brendan Mackey, Director of Griffith University’s Climate Change Response Program, speaks at Woods Hole Research Center on March 21, 2019 on “Protecting Primary Forests: How We Can Get There and Why it Affects Us All”.
There is a convincing body of evidence shows that, as it is presently codified, sustainable forest-management logging implemented at an industrial scale guarantees commercial and biological depletion of high-value timber species within three harvests in all three major tropical forest regions.