False economy What’s in it for me? Understand what makes the

We need to protect forests, peats and 
wetlands, and restore degraded land.
So far, we’ve mainly addressed the first part of 
the formula to solve climate change: cutting 
carbon emissions. But to reverse global 
warming, we also need to protect and restore 
the ecosystems that naturally take up carbon in 
the atmosphere and put it back in the soil where 
it belongs.
Forests, especially rainforests, are some of the 
most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. 
Plants, insects, animals and trees live in close 
proximity, forming complex communities of 
mutual benefit. Only recently, scientists 
discovered that individual trees communicate 
with each other via a hidden network of fungi in 
the soil. Over this “wood wide web,” they share 
nutrients and vital information about insects, 
droughts and other dangers. Taken all together, 
forests store 300 billion tons of carbon, yet 15 
billion trees are cut down each year. When 
forests are destroyed, soil health plummets, and 
the degraded land releases its carbon content 
into the air. More than 10 percent of annual 
carbon emissions are caused this way.
Deforestation needs to stop now. Brazil has led 
the forest protection movement by example. 
After years of unchecked deforestation, the 
country began in 2004 to enact strong 
enforcement policies, monitoring the forest by 
satellite and financing sustainable development 
projects. As a result, deforestation significantly 
slowed down, and some of the forest could be 
restored.
Most deforested land can be restored by simply 
leaving it alone. Passive restoration could 
restore 235 million acres of forest by 2050, 
avoiding 22.61 gigatons of carbon emissions. 
More active approaches restore or create forests 
by planting seedlings.
Other biodiverse ecosystems that deserve our 
attention are coastal wetlands such as marshes, 
meadows and mangroves, as well as peatlands 
such as bogs and mires. Peatlands, for instance, 
are an incredible carbon sink. Peat is made of 
decomposing plant matter, and holds twice as 
much carbon as the world’s forests. It’s our duty 
to map, monitor and preserve these natural 
carbon sinks.
Indigenous people, who are among the most 
affected by climate change and the least 
responsible for it, could play an important role in 
protecting these ecosystems. Their traditional 
practices of land management, agroforestry and 
pastoralism are a model for feeding off nature 
without depleting it. Setting up conservation 
agreements, granting land ownership and 
returning 
native 
lands 
to 
indigenous 
communities will not only ensure their livelihood 
but that of the land too.