BSS:
World leaders will conclude a two-day climate summit on Tuesday with a multibillion-dollar pledge to end
deforestation by 2030 — a date too far away for campaigners who want action ooner to save the planet’s lungs. The pledge was to be issued at the UN’s COP26 conference, which will continue for another fortnight to try to craft national plans to forestall the most devastating impacts of global warming. The summit’s chair, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson, said the agreement on deforestation was pivotal to the overarching ambition of limiting temperature rises to 1.5 degrees Celsius.
“These great teeming ecosystems-these cathedrals of nature-are the lungs of our planet,” he was expected to say in Glasgow, according to Downing Street. “Forests support communities, livelihoods and food supply, and absorb the carbon we pump into the atmosphere. They are essential to our very survival,” Johnson said.
“With today’s (Tuesday’s) unprecedented pledges, we will have a chance to end humanity’s long history as nature’s conqueror, and instead become its custodian.” The pledge is backed by almost $20 billion in public and private funding, and is endorsed by more than 100 leaders representing over 85 percent of the
world’s forests, the UK government said.
The leaders include those of forest-rich Brazil and Russia, both condemned by activists for accelerating their own rates of deforestation, along with US President Joe Biden and others.
President Joko Widodo of resource-blessed Indonesia said his own archipelago’s rainforests, mangroves, seas and peatlands were key torestricting climate change.
