Forests: EverGreening the Earth’s Degraded Landscapes

Climate change is occurring much faster, and is wreaking much more damage than was predicted even just a few years ago. The acceleration of global warming is nearly unstoppable – unless we act now, and unless we act ambitiously, together, as a global community. A global goal, and a set of six ambitious targets, are proposed to overcome the climate crisis, keep our earth habitable, and improve the lives of people around the planet.

The goal is to capture and restore back to the land 20 billion tons of CO2 annually from the atmosphere by the year 2050, to create a drawdown of 10 billion tons of negative CO2 emissions per year, through evergreening or nature-based storage of carbon. The six targets include: Tripling the current rate of increasing tree cover on farmlands; scaling-up leguminous shrubs on farmlands; restoring tree cover on degraded forest lands through assisted natural regeneration; and regenerating a healthy grass-tree balance on degraded pasturelands.

This session aims to inspire concrete action, set cascading targets, build capacity for scaling-up evergreening practices, implementing at the grassroots level, and tracking the impact from local to global levels. For more information on this campaign, please visit evergreening.org.