Progress on forests at COP29 and beyond depends on equity

Clearcut logging in Quebec

At last year's UN climate conference in Dubai, Parties left no doubt about the ambition on forest protection necessary to averting the worst impacts of climate change. The Global Stocktake (GST) decision, signed by 193 countries, included in its roadmap to preventing exceeding 1.5 degrees of warming a 2030 deadline for halting and reversing deforestation and land degradation. With little forward progress one year later, the climate negotiators gathered in Baku for COP29 now need to contend with actually delivering on that commitment. That includes addressing one of forest governance's most fatal flaws, which has tainted agreements and thwarted commitments for more than thirty years: inequitable accountability.

For decades, developed countries such as Canada, Sweden, Finland, Australia, and the United States have shaped forest policy to accommodate their behemoth logging industries. The Global North has rigged the rulebook to carve out its own criteria for forest sustainability, distancing itself from the standards and processes it applies to the rest of the world. This has left the Global South to shoulder the burden-and the blame when commitments fail.

The very term at the center of forest policy, "deforestation," is defined around northern interests. In policy parlance, it applies only to the actual conversion of a forest to a different land use, such as cattle pasture or a palm oil plantation. Clearcut logging, the Global North mythologizes, does not eliminate a forest at all-a barren, stump-filled landscape is merely "temporarily unstocked" of trees. Since the northern logging industry intends trees to regrow, usually to provide subsequent generations of wood supply, that land is still, under the rosy auspices of legal fiction, a forest.

As a result, countries in the Global North can claim near-zero deforestation even while industrial logging in northern forests is among the largest drivers of tree cover loss in the world. Much of this logging occurs in irreplaceable primary and old-growth forests, eroding them, even if trees regrow, into pale reflections of their once-rich complexity and driving devastating climate impacts.

Instead, the Global North has obscured the impact of its logging practices through the liberal use of the term "sustainable forest management," and created an artificial division between how the world talks about forest impacts in the tropics and those that occur everywhere else. Its "nothing to see here" attitude also justifies a lack of transparency, meaning data from the wealthiest countries is, counterintuitively, the sparsest.

The fiction of northern inculpability is also fueled by flawed systems of forest carbon accounting. Canada, for instance, is able to obscure the fact that its logging sector is the country's third-highest emitter. The country's own Commissioner of the Environment and Sustainable Development has issued repeated rebukes to the federal government for lack of transparency around logging's impact.

In the European Union (EU), the logging industry's obstructionism is currently playing out in full view. Last year, the EU enacted the EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), one of the strongest forest sustainability measures in history. The EUDR prohibits trade tied to deforestation or forest degradation-a term defined explicitly to capture common northern logging practices. Instead of cleaning up their supply chains to comply, Global North countries like Canada have worked to undermine the EUDR's definitions to ensure that, despite its international scope, it would not apply to their forests. Just this week, the EU voted in favor of a law-gutting carveout that would effectively exempt their own logging industries from the law.

Since August 2023, African nations have been urging the adoption of a framework to drive equitable accountability for delivering on forest protection. Nigeria's Minister of Environment reiterated this call at the conclusion of this year's UN biodiversity conference, asking the world to adopt a framework to build "equitable accountability for truly global action on halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030."

At COP29, Parties can take up African nations' call by integrating equitable forest accountability into GST implementation mechanisms and setting expectations for heightened transparency, for all countries, on forest impacts in their national plans and reporting. As they chart pathways for building synergies between the climate and biodiversity conventions, they can ensure equity and common expectations between Global North and Global South are included. They can work to amend the forest carbon accounting practices that have allowed northern countries to hide the logging industry's impact.

They also need to support the establishment of a Global Forest Equity Framework (GFEF) that builds cooperation, ensures equitable responsibility, and instills shared expectations for transparency. The GFEF is built on three central pillars: equitable standards, shared monitoring expectations, and common reporting practices. Through this framework, Parties would work cooperatively, as true partners, to evaluate, monitor, report, and address deforestation and forest degradation across all forests.

Shaking off the legacy of northern mythmaking will ultimately make economies healthier and stronger. The forestry sector can align with biodiversity and climate targets and respect the rights of Indigenous Peoples. In fact, particularly following the passage of the EUDR, many companies and investors have embraced more stringent standards, recognizing the market, supply chain, and reputational risks of failing to do so.

The stakes are high, and time is short. Next year's COP will be in Belém, Brazil, putting forests, quite literally, at the center of the negotiations. Negotiators in Baku will set the tone leading into Brazil's presidency, helping determine the rigor, transparency, and efficiency of global action on forests and whether the international community can finally break the cycle of failed promises and deliver strong actions. Overcoming decades of failure requires the Global North to break its reflexive impulse to hold itself above the affairs of forest accountability. Global inequity has stunted progress for decades. Global unity will spur a new, more sustainable chapter.

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