Prince Charles: Our fate is bound up with future of world’s forests

Many steps have been taken in the past decade to protect forests and there is some heartening progress to report across a broad sweep of work.

Mahatma Gandhi once memorably wrote: “What we are doing to the forests of the world is but a mirror reflection of what we are doing to ourselves and to one another.” How right he was, and how pertinent this remark continues to be in 2015: for, despite all our efforts, we continue to deplete the forests of the world, with profoundly negative consequences for our wellbeing and for the planet at large, including – most importantly – its climate.

I was heartened to see the statement by political leaders on the importance of forests and their announcement of ongoing domestic action and international support for forest conservation efforts around the world. I thought I would focus my remarks on three, I hope, practical ways in which I believe we can make a positive difference to the fate of the world’s forests and climate in the years ahead.

The first is on the issue of forest peoples and indigenous peoples. I believe first and foremost that we must do all that we can to support the communities that live within forests, or alongside them, to continue to protect and cherish those forests over time. For indigenous peoples, this is a question of the proper safeguarding of their reserves, traditions and cultures; for forest peoples more generally, a question of good governance, institutions, land tenure reform, and adequate support.

All our efforts should, in the first instance, be guided by the people whose lives are so much more intimately intertwined with the forests than our own; and that the approaches we take should both recognise and protect their rights, and draw on their wisdom, their perspectives and, of course, their hopes for the future. I think we should all acknowledge and salute the work, over several decades, of many present today in this direction, including community leaders, who have done so much to ensure that the voices of the indigenous and forest peoples have not been silenced and lost.

My second reflection concerns the transformation of global commodity supply chains. Encouraging though the progress made to date has been, it remains the case that many of the world’s largest companies – and their financial backers – pay scant, by which I really mean no, attention to their deforestation footprint.

It seems that the vital role forests play in generating and regulating the rainfall upon which agriculture and food security depend is of itself insufficient incentive to act responsibly. Stopping deforestation has to become the goal to which all commodity companies are committed, with “zero net deforestation” becoming the norm.

And, thirdly, I hope we might all act further in the years ahead to bring about, at a large scale, the kinds of sensitively conducted and ecologically- resilient forest landscape restoration that the world so urgently needs to see. Given that we have managed to reduce the world’s tropical forests so significantly over recent decades (with over 500 million hectares lost since 1950), the restoration of forests and forest landscapes should not be an afterthought. As all the horrors of even a two degree warmer world bite – and bite they will – we are going to need a lot more forest, not a slight reduction in the existing rate of attrition!

All of this is brought sharply into focus by the recent science which tells us that as much as a third of climate change mitigation can come from forests and the land use sector more broadly. In light of this, the increased attention given to forest protection and restoration over the last few years is, of course, to be hugely welcomed.

But in recognising that the true value of this critical Paris conference is what happens afterwards, there is perhaps an argument that international processes could, in coming years, give even greater consideration to the role of forests and land use in both climate change mitigation and adaptation.

With political will and leadership – spurred on in turn by further leadership from the private sector and from civil society – everything becomes possible as Brazil and others are beginning to show. It is only with bold commitments, leadership, cooperation and tenacity that it will be possible to safeguard the world’s forests, without which, we have no future, or certainly not one that we would wish to inhabit.

On such a vital subject, there can be no room for failure. It is very simple: we must save our forests, for there is no Plan B to tackle climate change or many of the other critical challenges that face humanity without them.

This is an edited extract of the second speech delivered by the Prince of Wales at the United Nations climate change summit in Paris.