BLBG Session 6 Sustainable Forests for a Sustainable Future

‐ Hello and welcome, I'm Mallika Kapur, Deputy Global Editor at Bloomberg Live. On behalf of Bloomberg, I am so pleased you could join us for this day two of Bloomberg Green Festival. The topic of this next session is "Sustainable Forests for a Sustainable Future." We're gonna get to that in just a minute, but before that, I wanted to thank our festival sounding partner, HP, for helping to make today's virtual event possible. And before we get started, I just have a couple of housekeeping announcements, just so that you can enjoy the program more. If you experience any issues with audio or video quality, just refresh your browser or use the chat box in the bottom right corner of your screen for support. You will be able to submit questions during the interviews, and we really hope you do, we want this to be as interactive a conversation as possible. And while we probably won't get to all of you, we will do our best to get to as many of you as we can. So to submit a question, just click open the white tab on the right hand side of the video window and submit your question, do include your name and your location so we can give you a shout out. Also we are on social media, of course, and we'd love it if you engaged with us there. So join the conversation there using the hashtag, #Bloomberg green, okay? Time for the next session now. And I'd like to hand it over to my colleague, Adam majendie, Senior Editor at Bloomberg Green for the next session. ‐ In the past couple of years, we've seen a dramatic increase in reports of burning around the world from the Arctic circle to the tropics. And it's raising the alarm on what is really one of the defining environmental issues of our time, the future of our forests. So I'm Adam Majendie, a senior editor for Bloomberg Green, and to help lead us through this complex topic, we're pleased to invite Carter Roberts, president of the WWF in the US. Carter, thank you for joining the Bloomberg Green Festival. ‐ Thanks Adam, it's great to be here. ‐ So I'd like to start with a look at the patient. What is the state of health of our global forests right now? ‐ Well, I think all you have to do is look at the, the pictures on the news feeds today from California, with orange skies and San Francisco evidence of the fires that are burning there. A reminder of the fires that have burned in Brazil and Australia and consuming many other parts of the world. And, and you know, that parks are at risk. We are seeing forests decline, particularly in the tropics, at a astounding rate, something that can to 20 soccer fields every minute. And, we've lost about a billion acres since 1990 and that's due to a number of causes. One is climate change, which causes forests to, to change in their composition. Unsustainable food production is probably the leading cause. The development of infrastructure as countries want to develop and bring products to market and markets to people. And, and then last but not least, just the lack of valuing of forests and particularly by certain governments around the world who now seek to cut down forests and exploit them as part of restarting their economy. So forests very much at risk and we valued forests historically because they're store houses of nature. But we increasingly see just how profoundly they are and how profoundly important they are to you and me and the rest of humanities. ‐ So to take that point, I mean, before we get into the question of how do we stop all of this degradation, just set out, why does this matter? Why is it so important to stop losing so much of this particular ecosystem? I mean, given that, say for example, it gets replaced by like other trees, palm trees, or it gets replaced by crops or something like that. What is, what are we losing? ‐ Yeah, when you, when you cut down an intact rich tropical forest and replace it with a commodity monoculture, you lose a glittering array of life, the species with whom we share this planet, particularly tropical forests. You often lose other services that forests provide. The forests around the world, sequester seven times what humanity emits in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The sequester is that carbon, and every time we cut down trees, we release it. And so they are, one of the biggest engines of stabilizing climate change and attack forests. Forests also provide 70% of the water that people use on the planet. And just as one example, the Amazon is the main weather engine for South America. As the rain comes off of the Atlantic drops into the Amazon evaporates repeats, repeats, since the Andes turned South. It provides water to the second largest bread basket in the world. You turn off that engine and you severely cripple Brazil's economy and the provision of food to the world. And, then there is the connection between forests, intact forests and the spillover of zoonotic diseases. When we dig deep into a forest, we provide the conditions for bats to transmit disease. I'll stop. ‐ Just before we get to that, I wanted to ask about the question that the issue you raised about the development issue, you, some of the reasons that you've given for the destruction of these forests is, a lot of it is obviously to do with countries, wanting to develop, seeing a short term gain that they can get from doing this. Come talk a little bit about what we can do, what companies and governments can do to mitigate that, to find ways where they don't have to tear down the forest or burn down the forests in order to get that sort of development. ‐ Right, we know there's this there's an economic imperative in every government. And governments, they can provide food for their people and also for export markets, by shifting the new production of food to degraded land, to the renewing of soils and land that's already been cut down to plant new crops there. Governments can be much smarter in how they design infrastructure. So they can draw a line on the map in a way that keeps the richest standing forest intact and still provides the means to bring food to market. Governments can also, governments can also condition the growth of food on food being deforestation free. Then, let me come to the flip side, which is companies around the world can condition their purchasing a product from that government or from that locale, by ensuring that it's either market certified using FSC certification or ensuring that those products were grown without cutting down trees. And that's proven to be a powerful mechanism to governments in keeping their forest intact while growing food, or while building infrastructure in whatever way they do. ‐ So what's the role, I mean, how can the public help in this? I mean, social media has become an incredibly powerful tool in the past few years, able to exert an extraordinary amount of pressure on politicians, on governments, on companies. What what's, what's your advice to people out there right now? Let's go out, let's do something to stop this destruction. ‐ People can do a number of things. They can choose what they eat and they can choose what they buy. And they can prefer products that are either FSC certified, or they can prefer products from companies that play strict restrictions on their supply chains. People can also choose to elect politicians one over another, and they can signal the importance of conservation for all the reasons we've already talked about to their families, to their communities, to their economies. last but not least, people can choose what they do in their workplace, businesses, governments, universities, and in every family. There are choices that you make in terms of policies, signals that you send, requirements that you put in place and how you conduct your business, that recognizes the value of nature. People are powerful in this equation and they need to make their voices heard. I've always said, we need to bring the movement back to the environmental movement, which has become so mainstream. ‐ So, I mean, that brings us to the point that I think you were getting to, which was this. One of the things that the current pandemic has shown us is how very closely related the events of nature are. And in particular, how rapidly, something that happens in one part of the world can spread to affect us all. What is the, how can we help to prevent this, this kind of a pandemic, this kind of virus in future, through the use of the way we manage the forests? How is that contributing to this? ‐ If you read the history of all the great plagues through time, inevitably the history recounts, how people identify the root cause of that plague and did something about it. To date, I would argue, we have spent more time addressing the symptoms of this plague and addressing those symptoms, but we haven't done enough to get to the root cause, which is this.

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