The FAO report stressed that wildfires emitted an estimated 6687 mega tons of carbon dioxide globally during 2023, which was more than double the carbon dioxide emissions level set by the European Union, a factor addressed to the unabated burning of fossil fuels for industries and locomotives in that year
By Salam Rajesh
Recent data indicates a significant reduction in deforestation in many countries, yet climate change is making forests more vulnerable to stressors like wildfire and pests, screams the headline of the Food and Agricultural Organization (FAO)’s recent report, ‘The State of the World’s Forests 2024: Forest-sector innovations towards a more sustainable future’.
FAO points the finger to climate change making forests more vulnerable to abiotic and biotic stressors like wildfire and pests. While highlighting that wildfire intensity and frequency are increasing with every passing year, the report noted with some concern that boreal forests accounted for nearly one-quarter of carbon-dioxide emissions due to wildfire during 2021.
The FAO report stressed that wildfires emitted an estimated 6687 mega tons of carbon dioxide globally during 2023, which was more than double the carbon dioxide emissions level set by the European Union, a factor addressed to the unabated burning of fossil fuels for industries and locomotives in that year.
Many parts of the world, including Australia, the United States, countries in Europe and Asia were subjected to intense and damaging wildfires in recent years, of which the January 2025 wildfires in Los Angeles and Hollywood are marked for the ferocity and intensity of the fires that destroyed large swaths of forests, and causing heavy losses and damage.
Yet again, in the United States of America, 25 million hectare of forestlands were projected to have experienced losses exceeding 20 percent of the host tree basal area due to insects and disease through to 2027, the report stated featuring the biotic stressor of climate-related events.
The combination of the two stressors are cause of worry for the world community as every succeeding year is seeing events of unprecedented nature, and of colossal damages to land, people and the wildlife.
Considering the rapidly changing environmental conditions and the rising demands on forests, the report stressed that more innovation is needed in the forest sector to cope with the increasing challenges of the times, particularly stressed with the increased instances of weather and climate related extremities.
The FAO report is of the opinion that three imperatives could drive the innovation called for, urgently. These are: (1) escalating stressors, including climate change, which will require new forest and land management approaches; (2) the shift towards a bio-economy in which wood will be a major input; and (3) the opportunities offered by the vast range of non-wood forest products for potentially billions of smallholders.
Assessing that innovation is a key enabler of progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of the United Nations, the FAO report ascribes that innovation is required to scale up forest conservation, restoration, and sustainable use as solutions to the current global challenges aggravated by the triple planetary crises – global warming, climate change, and extreme weather events.
Innovation is seen in the light of assisting efforts to halt deforestation and maintain healthy forests. Innovation in the best sense includes the model for fostering multi-stakeholder governance to scale up integrated sustainable landscape management, the report emphasized.
Innovation entails the use of new data on the role of forests in agricultural productivity to finance forest conservation and in harnessing the power of partnership and technological innovation to reduce commodity-driven forest loss.
Innovation is also the introduction of new tools and techniques in community forestry and in combining science, technology, and traditional knowledge to support Indigenous Peoples as forest custodians and in enabling locally led integrated fire management, the report stated.
In achieving the set targets, FAO suggests that innovation must be scaled up responsibly to maximize the contributions of the forest sector to agri-food systems transformation and other global challenges.
To this end, FAO suggests five enabling actions that can encourage responsible and inclusive innovation by optimizing forest-based solutions to meet the global challenges in hand. The first of these enabling actions suggested is to raise awareness on the importance of innovation and to create a culture that fosters innovation to bring about positive changes, both in the people’s mindset and in physical achievability.
The second suggested pathway is to boost skills, capabilities and knowledge to ensure that forest-sector stakeholders have the capacity to manage innovation creation and adoption, while the third suggested action is to encourage transformative partnerships to de-risk forest-sector innovation, and provide opportunities for knowledge and technology transfer, and build appropriate safeguards.
The fourth suggested pathway is to ensure universally accessible financial resources to encourage forest-sector innovations, and lastly, to provide a policy environment that incentivizes forest-sector innovations with priority focus on the forest dependent Indigenous peoples who are mostly the original custodians of some of the world’s most precious forest regions across the globe.
On the basis of emerging reports of extremities in weather and climate events, the report noted with certain concern that increased emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) have caused widespread and rapid changes in Earth’s atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere, resulting in the alarming consideration that the global surface temperature between 2011 and 2020 was 1.1 degrees Celsius higher than the temperatures recorded during 1850 to 1900 (the pre-industrial period).
Human-caused climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in all regions, leading to widespread adverse impacts and related losses and damage to both nature and people, the FAO report noted while stressing that the vulnerable communities who have historically contributed the least to current (human-induced) climate change are being affected disproportionately, and more severely.
Human actions threaten more species with global extinction now than ever before, the report extolled while emphasizing that an average of around 25 percent of species in assessed animal and plant groups are threatened globally, suggesting that about 1 million species already face extinction, many within decades, unless action is taken to reduce the intensity of drivers of biodiversity loss.
Biodiversity loss, which is accounted as stressor for inducing weather and climate changes, more rapidly in the present times from uncontrolled, unmonitored anthropogenic influences, needs to be halted and checked to prevent further collateral damages to the natural world and in order to meet the deadlines on the 2050 agenda, the report sums up with a fair warning to humanity to avoid catastrophe in the long run.