Responding to Climate Change - what you need to know

• “The world needs more effective and focused international action on tropical forests. That will help reduce poverty, protect biodiversity and also mitigate the effects of climate change.” - Emmanuel Ze Meka, ITTO’s  Executive President, will be urging more effective and focused international action on tropical forests at the XIII World Forestry Congress.

• Trees, woods and forests can make important contributions to the global carbon budget. This is both in terms of their potential to sequester carbon (i.e. storage of carbon in the woody components of trees) but, also, their potential to release carbon (i.e. through forest harvesting, forest fires, the natural decay of organic material). The role that forests play and how they can contribute to climate change mitigation is becoming increasingly clear as the result of numerous carbon sequestration research projects and international negotiations such as the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) and the Kyoto Protocol.

• “The fundamentals remain in place for a long-term boom in the prices of everything ag-related. The simplest metric to consider is the amount of farmland per person worldwide: In 1960 there were 1.1 acres of arable farmland per capita globally, according to data from the United Nations. By 2000 that had fallen to 0.6 acre. And over the next 40 years the population of the world is projected to grow from 6 billion to 9 billion. The farmland phenomenon is almost certainly still in the early stages and is playing itself out in many ways around the globe.”

• Virtually everything we do has an impact on the climate but fortunately, and as reported by Sir Nicholas Stern, "there is still time to avoid the worst impacts of climate change, if we take strong action now". This means governments and industry, of course, but it also means that each and every one of us must take responsibility for our impact on the environment.

• Over the past 20 years it has become increasingly evident that human activity is accelerating climate change. An enormous amount of research is being devoted to this topic which is reviewed periodically by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). By offsetting through WLT organisations are also contributing to biodiversity conservation as well as climate change mitigation.

• Its impact on an environment already rendered fragile by human activity, and the fact that humanity is driving it. The three main greenhouse gases are methane, nitrous oxide and, most importantly, carbon dioxide. The two main sources of CO2 are emissions from fossil fuel use and deforestation – one releasing carbon by burning ancient biomass and the other by burning its modern equivalent. CO2 concentrations are now far higher than at any time in the past 600,000 years and emissions continue at an accelerating rate. It is now clear (with more than 90% confidence) that they are warming the planet and so shifting the climatic regime.