Financing the rainforests

Today Forum for the Future is publishing a report which we hope will help governments and business to take urgent action to save the rainforests.

The Forest Investment Review was commissioned by the UK government, and sets out to shape thinking in the run-up to the UN’s conference on climate change in Copenhagen and beyond.

Protecting the world’s forests is a crucial part of the fight against global warming -deforestation and forest degradation account for around 18% of all global greenhouse gas emissions.

But the fact is that all over the world deforestation is driven by people’s need to make a living, whether it’s clearing land for subsistence farming or for intensive agriculture. So we have to find ways to reward people for looking after what is a vital global resource.

We’ve looked at how to finance the conservation of forests and generate sustainable economic development for the communities which depend on them. And we’ve looked at how government spending can unlock private investment to achieve funding on the scale we need.

The Forest Investment Review was commissioned by the UK's Department of International Development (DFID) and Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC), which are heavily engaged in climate change discussions with other governments ahead of Copenhagen. The report will help inform government policy-makers, in both developed countries and in the developing forest nations.

It’s the work of a team of experts in finance and forests, brought together by the Forum to assess the different areas in which private sector finance can be mobilised. They’ve each contributed a chapter focussing on a different aspect of the issue, for example what might encourage big institutional investors like pension funds to invest in forests.

We’re publishing each chapter as a separate paper on our website and we plan to make them available as a full report in a few weeks' time.

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