13 November 2024: Forests play a crucial role in climate change mitigation and adaptation. Creating a sustainable, equitable future and achieving the international climate goals as expressed in the Paris Agreement significantly depends on the protection, restoration, and sustainable management of forests around the world.
Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs) are the platform for countries who are Parties to the Paris Agreement to communicate their climate targets and actions, and are a critical entry point for leveraging climate action for forests and other global goals.
Despite forests’ critical role in meeting climate targets and countries’ commitments to protect them, many Parties have inadequately considered forests within their NDCs. Parties do not often include forest actions in their NDCs even though protecting and restoring forest ecosystems delivers multiple benefits for people and biodiversity and in turn can deliver against multiple global goals beyond NDCs.
The new report, Raising the Bar: Strengthening Forest Ambition in Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), assesses the extent to which NDCs integrate forest-related measures, and includes 130 NDCs from Parties with greater than 100,000 hectares of forest. This report was produced in collaboration with WWF and Climate Focus.
The report found that:
- Less than half of assessed NDCs set a forest- specific emissions mitigation target
- Quantitative targets on key forest issues are insufficient
- Only 4% of NDCs include explicit references to Deforestation and Conversion-free supply chains and many monitoring, reporting, and verification (MRV) sections lack mentions of forests
Without sufficient ambition and implementation of forest-related targets and measures, including those linking to biodiversity commitments and actions, governments risk breaking the promises they have made to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030.
The report includes the following recommendations for policymakers to fill the gap:
- Elevate forests as a national priority within NDCs
- Simplify and improve accounting and reporting
- Prioritize target areas that need more ambition, and ensure NDCs are synergistic with other national plans, such as NBSAPs, NAPs and SDGs.
- Set specific, timebound targets and detailed policy measures for implementation
- Align and increase finance for forests
- Build capacity and knowledge
- Improve interministerial coordination and strengthen synergies across policy processes
