Brazil’s Plan to End Deforestation Counts on Sustainable Timber Supply
Certified forest concessions in Indonesia’s Kalimantan cut deforestation by 5 percentage points compared with uncertified ones, whilst reduced-impact harvesting caused less forest damage.
Eucalyptus logs harvested from a plantation for wood chipping. The COP30 Presidency says planted forests can ease the pressure on natural forests by meeting demand for timber, fibre, and bioenergy. (Photo Credit: alffoto/iStock)
Existing policies are not enough to halt global deforestation by 2030, Brazil’s COP30 Presidency has warned, with the world clearing an average 10.9 million hectares of forest a year over the past decade. COP30 President André Corrêa do Lago and chief executive Ana Toni released the Presidency’s 158-page deforestation roadmap in Brasília last Tuesday, six days before the COP31 climate summit opened in Antalya, Türkiye.
“What the regime requires now is accelerated action,” Corrêa do Lago wrote in its foreword.
The roadmap was born at last year’s summit in Belém, where Corrêa do Lago announced it and Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, explained that the Presidency took it on because countries could not agree on deforestation in the summit’s main decision. Wood Central reported at the time that a roadmap to end deforestation was among COP30’s headline outcomes, alongside a planned US$125 billion fund for tropical forests.
Brazil’s environment minister, Marina Silva, at COP30 in Belém, where she explained that the Presidency took on the deforestation roadmap after countries could not agree in the summit’s main decision. (Photo Credit: UN Climate Change)
Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wrote on the eve of that summit that “the time for action plans has arrived”, and the Presidency offers the roadmap in that spirit, with no new commitments for countries and no negotiated status. Instead, it gathers evidence from more than 180 contributions around five pathways, with sustainable forest management, agroforestry, and the bioeconomy standing beside conservation and restoration.
That bioeconomy depends on a secure and sustainable supply of wood, the Presidency found, citing Brazil, Chile, and Finland to show that native forests under sustainable management and plantations can each supply it. Brazil’s plantations supply 91 per cent of the country’s industrial wood, whilst Finland’s forest sector, built on managed rather than planted forests, generated 4.5 per cent of its economy in 2018.
Planted forests can also ease the pressure on natural forests by meeting demand for timber, fibre, and bioenergy, with the benefits greatest where they go onto degraded or previously cleared land. Managed native forests can help in turn by lifting the value of standing forest relative to other land uses, the Presidency argues, provided environmental safeguards and management standards are in place, though it still puts conserving existing forests first.
Forests and their products must be “valued more highly standing than cleared” to halt deforestation, the forest and agroforestry research centre CIFOR-ICRAF argued in its own submission to the roadmap, with Robert Nasi and Christopher Martius among its contributors. Its research in Southeast Asia and the Congo Basin found well-managed selective harvesting can keep forest structure intact and earn more than clearing land for farming in many places.
A forest worker inspects a tree in the Mamirauá Reserve in Brazil’s Amazonas state, where researchers and riverside communities practise sustainable forest management. (Photo Credit: Tomaz Silva/Agência Brasil)
Certification helps too, with FSC-certified timber concessions in Indonesia’s Kalimantan cutting deforestation by 5 percentage points over eight years compared with uncertified ones, the Presidency found. Reduced-impact harvesting also caused less damage and carbon loss than conventional harvesting in the tropics, whilst unsustainable timber extraction and poorly managed selective harvesting remain causes of forest degradation.
Demand will test that supply, with the UN Food and Agriculture Organization projecting in 2024 that global roundwood demand could rise by up to 49 per cent between 2020 and 2050, as Wood Central reported at the time. Predictable markets for sustainable forest products depend on building codes, public procurement, product standards, and climate policy, the Presidency says, with mass timber and man-made cellulose fibres among the new products FAO expects to add to that demand.
Brazil also wants trade rules that reward deforestation-free production rather than relying solely on unilateral measures such as the EU’s Deforestation Regulation, which the Presidency said shifts costs onto exporting countries whose own laws permit land conversion. Indonesia, which runs its own timber legality verification, urged in its submission to the roadmap that international initiatives “avoid unilateral measures that may undermine trust”.
Australia also features among the country examples, with its National Reserve System protecting 26 per cent of the country’s native forest, according to Australia’s own submission to the roadmap. Australian Climate Change and Energy Minister Chris Bowen is leading the COP31 negotiations as President of Negotiations, under a power-sharing arrangement with host Türkiye.
Not everyone is convinced the roadmap can deliver, with the Brazil-based Igarapé Institute warning in May that it would be left without a mandate, secretariat, or institutional home once delivered. Corrêa do Lago told reporters in Brasília that some countries may want it to count towards the second global stocktake, calling it the “first contribution” to a discussion that begins at COP31 and runs until the stocktake concludes in 2028.
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