Parties to the Paris Agreement on Climate Change will be meeting in December in Poland. At the meeting, parties must finalise the “rulebook” – the operating manual required when the agreement takes force in 2020.
A technical meeting was held in Bonn, Germany, during May 2018 to try to reach agreement on the “rulebook”.
Director of ARCS International Forests and Climate Program, Virginia Young attended the meeting. Virginia gave a presentation, along with Dr Mary Booth, Director, Partnership for Policy Integrity, and Peg Putt, CEO Markets for Change. Their theme was ecosystem integrity and biodiversity protection.
Virginia Young argued that the Biodiversity Crisis and the Climate Crisis, if unchecked, will result in ecosystem collapse, release large relatively stable long-lived carbon stocks into the atmosphere and create severe social and economic disruption.
Virginia emphasised the importance of maintaining primary forests and preventing clearing and the degradation caused by logging.
Another major cause of forest loss and degradation is the construction of new roads through intact forests.
New roads not only directly cause clearing but also open up the forest to clearing for mining, agriculture, and other degradation.
The link below will take you to the full presentation.