Here are identified four new actions that would provide a solid policy foundation for key international negotiations, including forest-related multilateral environmental agreements, to help ensure that primary forests persist into the 21st Century:
(1) recognize primary forests as a matter of global concern within international negotiations
(2) incorporate primary forests into environmental accounting;
(3) prioritize the principle of avoided loss
(4) universally accept the important role of indigenous and community conserved areas.
• Failure by national governments and international negotiations to adopt a shared and science-based definition of forests has enabled key assumptions to go unchallenged. These include that industrial logging can conserve all forest biodiversity and ecosystem services through sustainable forest management approaches such as reduced impact logging and variable retention harvesting
• Another unchallenged assumption regarding how forests are addressed within the UN system has been that primary forests have minimal economic value. Thus, the economic value of their ecosystem services are not reflected in accounting and reporting systems.
• Intact forest landscapes exert a strong influence on catchment hydrology and the quality and flow of water.
• International and national policies that aim to merely slow rates of land-use-related greenhouse gas emissions and species extinctions from primary forests are inadequate as we need to be fixing these problems at a faster rate than we are causing them. There is considerable merit, therefore, in emphasizing policies that seek to avoid any further biodiversity loss and emissions from primary forest deforestation and degradation by prioritizing the principle of avoided loss.
• While forests are acknowledged as playing important roles in climate change mitigation and adaptation globally, current provisions on forests within the UNFCCC have significant failings with respect to primary forest conservation
• If national governments intend to comply with the international environmental treaties they have signed, then new policies are needed that provide incentives for avoiding logging-related emissions through forest protection rather than merely reducing the rate of emissions from land use.
• national governments can help reset forest policies globally by shifting away from addressing “all types of forests” generically toward a new regime based on the key principle that protection of primary forests is prioritized and accelerated. Enabling this shift also will require strengthening global policy coordination in support of primary forest protection across multilateral environmental agreements and UN processes
• we caution against subsidizing industrial logging operations to mitigate their environmental impacts as there is no substitute for the unique biodiversity values and ecosystem services that primary forests provide.
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