Forests for Growth

• Author: Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch

Forests for Growth Finance & Development, March 2017, Vol. 54, No. 1

Frances Seymour and Jonah Busch

Forests are a key asset for climate stability; Brazil has shown protecting them is compatible with development

Tropical forests are places of wonder and beauty in the popular imagination, rich in cultural and biological diversity. Development planners view them more practically—as a source of timber revenue or a land bank for agricultural expansion. But evidence to support a third view is growing rapidly—tropical forests provide essential services that underpin both global climate stability and development goals.

Protecting tropical forests need not be a drag on development, nor a zero-sum trade-off with growth and poverty reduction. Brazil has demonstrated that many of the steps to protect forests are feasible, affordable, “no regrets” measures in tune with more equitable and inclusive growth. Paying developing economies to keep carbon, a major source of global warming, in forests can help overcome incentives for deforestation as usual.

From problem to solutionClimate change is increasingly recognized as a key threat to global economic growth and development, especially to poor households and countries. Exposure to a single major natural disaster such as a hurricane—expected to be more frequent and severe on a warming planet—can knock a country off its economic growth trajectory for decades (Hsiang and Jina 2014).

While everyone knows that burning fossil fuels generates the emissions that cause climate change, deforestation’s role is less well known, and forest protection is an undervalued solution to the problem. Every time an area of forest is cleared or burned, the carbon stored in tree trunks, branches, and leaves is released to the atmosphere. The total contribution of emissions from deforestation exceeds that of the European Union, trailing only China and the United States. Halting tropical deforestation—which currently denudes an area the size of Austria every year—would make a significant dent in global annual emissions.

And because forests recapture carbon as they grow back, they can also mitigate emissions from other sources. In other words, as a natural carbon-capture-and-storage technology, forests can produce net negative emissions, essential to the long-term goal of the 2015 Paris Agreement on mitigating climate change for balance between emissions and removals. Stopping tropical deforestation and allowing damaged forests to recover could deliver reductions of up to 30 percent of current emissions (see Chart 1).

The potential of forests to contribute to mitigation was one reason the Paris Agreement singled out forest conservation as an important opportunity for international cooperation. The Agreement endorses a framework for...