Hopes and fears from COP 28

I am writing this from the sweltering COP 28 climate conference in Dubai, seeing the rush of delegates, the swirl of meetings and announcements happening all around. There are a lot of conversations about the importance of forests and tree planting which is great but we have fears too.

There is a risk that a ‘green rush’, where companies and governments get caught up in carbon offsets, will result in them failing to see the wood from the trees. A risk that they will rush to plant ecological deserts, single species plantations from which wildlife is largely absent (in the UK, woodland birds have declined by 15% in the last five years, even while tree cover has increased). A risk that communities will be overlooked and worst, evicted from their land in order to farm carbon from forests (as happened earlier this year). And a risk that the complex mathematics of carbon accounting will not achieve the benefits claimed (as in this article on Verra carbon standards).

At ITF we have a unique vantage point. We are on the ground witnessing what happens when tree planting is done well. We work directly with local communities, listening to their needs and understanding the aspirations they have for the landscapes around them. As a result, we truly know what good looks like.

We directly support projects that create an impact at different levels – where local people are reshaping their farms and reforesting the land around them, where wildlife is returning and the ecological restoration is reducing flood and drought risk for those further downstream. So here at COP, I see ITF’s role clearly. We want to influence others to see forest protection and reforestation in a holistic way.

Zooming back further from the busyness of COP, I fear that the promises and announcements being made here by governments and multi-nationals are simply not enough, or even worse, may be so misguided as to actually do harm. As a father of three, I’m worried that their world will be one with fewer species, less majesty and adventure, greater climate calamities and a return to bleaker times.

But despite the risks and the fears, I also have a fierce hope that while global temperatures will undoubtedly continue to rise in the coming years, they will eventually come down. The question is how we can bend the graph quickly? How many species can we save? And how can we mitigate the impacts for those who will suffer the most? I believe that human solidarity and a sense of shared destiny, tied to the fortunes of our precious planet, will lead to a brighter future for those who will come after us and that every effort, every positive action that we take, will count.

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