Forests are the crown jewels of Latin America and the Caribbean’s (LAC’s) ecological endowment. The region boasts roughly half of the world’s tropical forests and a quarter of its mangroves.
But LAC forests face extraordinary challenges in the 2020s. They are being cleared and degraded at an alarming rate. Climate change is altering forest functioning, plant growth, and tree mortality. And managed forests confront increasing competition from Asia, declining global demand, and lagging sustainability certification.
The good news is that the current political climate favors meaningful policy action to address these challenges. Forests have attracted unprecedented attention in recent years in large part because of an emerging consensus that averting the worst effects of climate change will require step changes in forest conservation and restoration.
How can this political momentum best be used to promote conservation, restoration, and efficient management of LAC’s forests in the 2020s?
To answer that question, a new IDB monograph, Latin American and Caribbean Forests in the 2020s: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities, brings together four reports by leading experts focusing on (i) forest conservation and restoration, (ii) two-way links between forests and climate change, (iii) forest management, including trends in international trade in timber and bioenergy, sustainable forest management, and nontimber forest products, and finally, (iv) the IDB Group’s experience with forest projects over the past 13 years.
The reports offer several key messages:
1. First, domestic forest conservation policies and programs such as land-use change regulations are often hamstrung by resistance from land managers, a dynamic that has played out in Brazil over the past decade. As a result, although these types of policies can have significant short-term benefits, they are likely to be unsustainable in the long term unless accompanied by positive incentives for land managers.
2. Second, human-induced phenomena have triggered dramatic shifts in forest ecology, reducing resilience and productivity and spurring large-scale diebacks. The combined effects of global climate change, regional deforestation, and increased forest fires may well cause up to 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest to disappear by 2050.
3. Third, although growth in LAC’s wood products sector has exceeded the world’s average since the 1960s, virtually all of this growth has been due to expansion in three countries, Brazil, Chile, and Uruguay, which have invested in fast-growing plantations. Moreover, these plantations face competitive pressure because of declining world markets for paper products. It is therefore important for LAC to explore opportunities for new markets, new products, and enhanced productivity.
4. Finally, since 2006, the IDB Group has invested almost US $1.5 billion in LAC forest projects aimed at conserving, restoring, or sustainably managing natural forest resources, as well as promoting forest plantations and agroforestry. Both the number of IDB Group forest projects and their funding have increased significantly since 2006, mostly because of the increased availability of climate finance, which accounted for 14 percent of all forest funding approved by the IDB Group in the study period.
As preeminent biodiversity scientist Tom Lovejoy writes in the Forward, this new IDB Group monograph appears at a critical time in Latin America and Caribbean, when the Bank’s leadership is working to show the way to sustainability. It provides a wealth of information and insights that can help to inform and guide LAC forest policy in the 2020s.
Further reading:
Latin American and Caribbean Forests in the 2020s: Trends, Challenges, and Opportunities
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