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US President Joe Biden welcomes and supports the pact concluded at the World Climate Conference by more than 100 countries to stop the destruction of forests and other landscapes by 2030.
Glasgow – US President Joe Biden welcomes and supports the pact concluded at the World Climate Conference by more than 100 countries to stop the destruction of forests and other landscapes by 2030. Preserving the forests is indispensable in order to achieve the common goals in climate protection, he said on Tuesday in Glasgow at an event organized by the British government, which chairs COP26. Added to this is the protection of water, biodiversity and indigenous communities.
Biden said forests have great potential to remove climate-damaging carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The protection of the forests must therefore have the same priority as the climate-friendly restructuring of the economy. The US now wanted to help the world stop deforestation and restore at least 200 million hectares of forest and other ecosystems by 2030.
British Prime Minister Boris Johnson said protecting biodiversity and the climate are two sides of the same coin. Forests are “the cathedrals of nature” and the lungs of our planet. The countries involved in the initiative, including Germany and the entire EU, represent, according to British figures, 85 percent of the world’s forest area, i.e. around 34 million square kilometers. Also included are the countries with the largest forests of all, i.e. Canada, Russia, Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia as well as China, Norway and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
According to this, around 12 billion US dollars (around 10.3 billion euros) in public funds will be mobilized for the project by 2025. In addition, there are 7.2 billion US dollars in private investments. Forests are considered the lungs of our planet, they absorb around a third of the CO2 emissions emitted by humans each year. But they are shrinking alarmingly, as the message went on to say: Every minute an area of around 27 football fields is lost.
Experts, however, have received the plans with some skepticism. A similar statement from 2014 has proven to be completely ineffective, said climate and forest expert Simon Lewis from University College London of the BBC. And Silvia Holten, press spokeswoman for World Vision and an expert in regenerative reforestation, spoke of a half-baked sham ». Large and important ecosystems are already being destroyed, in the Amazon as well as in the Siberian forests. (dpa)
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