Meeting Global Forest Targets Requires Equitable Accountability

After decades of incremental global efforts, leaving too many commitments and promises unfulfilled, the international community has an opportunity to finally deliver on forest protection. Countries have begun negotiations around implementing the recommendations emerging from the Global Stocktake (GST), a roadmap to meeting international climate targets agreed at last year’s UN climate conference (COP28) that includes calls for halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030. In positioning forest protection as a centerpiece of climate action, the GST has the potential to break through the long history of collapsed commitments.

Realizing this ambition, however, requires overcoming the inequities that have undercut modern forest policy by exempting the Global North from the scrutiny placed on the Global South. For the GST to succeed where past forest commitments have failed, there has to be a framework for driving truly global, equitable accountability.

For decades, international attention has focused almost exclusively on deforestation in the tropics. Meanwhile, industrial logging, overwhelmingly occurring in northern countries, is the largest driver of tree cover loss in the world. Much of northern logging occurs in irreplaceable primary and old-growth forests, driving catastrophic levels of emissions and habitat loss. In Canada, for example, the logging industry clearcuts more than 1.4 million acres each year, and has an annual emissions footprint that rivals other high-emitting sectors. Sweden, meanwhile, is on track to wipe out its old-growth forests by the 2070s.   

This forest degradation has thrived in policy vagueness. Without standards and accountability measures, northern countries have been able to tailor definitions to fit into business-as-usual paradigms, while data and actual delivery get crowded out by rhetoric and revisionism. Clearcut logging, therefore, does not count as “deforestation”; in the face of increased scrutiny for forest degradation, Canada and other countries are seeking to redefine the term nationally to align with current logging practices. 

As a result, this widespread logging-driven degradation in the Global North has not only gone unchecked—it’s lauded and misleadingly labeled “sustainable forest management.”

Despite more limited national resources to monitor and report, tropical countries have set a much higher bar for reporting on degradation. In 2020, for the first time, the FAO’s Forest Resource Assessment (FRA) requested that countries indicate whether they monitor forest degradation. Only 58 countries reported that they monitor forest degradation and, of these, almost one-third were in Africa. Reporting was most comprehensive in South America, where the reporting countries accounted for 79 percent of the region’s forest area. Seventy-two percent of the forest area of reporting countries was in the tropical climatic domain; reporting from the boreal forest, in contrast, accounted for only 4 percent.

Northern countries’ circumvention of accountability for their role in degrading their forests has undermined trust between countries and the Global North’s credibility in calling for action in the Global South. In developing paradigms that enable workarounds for themselves, the Global North has necessarily lowered standards everywhere. In a globally connected marketplace, this has disincentivized the development of more sustainable practices and fostered confusion, inefficiencies, and biases.  

To deliver on the forest commitment in the GST, all Parties need to pursue mechanisms to drive global accountability, action, and support as true and equal partners. While focus has been on individual countries’ reporting, the inequities in forest policy will not simply be solved at the national level—it requires building global cohesion, shared understandings, and interconnected support and solutions.

Last August, the African Conference of Environment Ministers called for the creation of a Glasgow Declaration Accountability Framework (GDAF) to promote the equitable delivery of countries’ commitments to halt and reverse deforestation and land degradation by 2030, enshrined in the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use. In advance of COP28, more than 100 NGOs echoed this call.

With the need to halt and reverse deforestation and forest degradation by 2030 now in the GST, and complemented by aligned commitments under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) and the UN Convention for Combating Desertification, the imperative for the GDAF now transcends the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration. Instead, it serves as a framework for driving equitable accountability on forests across international conventions.  

The accountability framework is built around three central pillars:

1.)  Establishing clear, common, equitable standards that hold Global North countries, like the Global South, to scientifically rigorous expectations

2.)  Improving monitoring and data collection, both through setting expectations that Global North countries address their large gaps in monitoring and creating platforms for financing and capacity building in the Global South

3.)  Standardizing reporting and creating review processes to ensure that countries’ reporting under the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, CBD, FAO, and other mechanisms matches the metrics needed to gauge progress toward the 2030 forest goal

In a crowded field of policy proposals and support structures, the accountability framework is not another annex, but rather a means of addressing foundational, systemic limitations and biases in global forest policy. These pillars will, where possible, attach to existing processes, fora, and mechanisms, creating new structures to drive GST implementation only where gaps exist.

The 2030 forest target is not simply a goal on paper—it is a planetary deadline that is fast approaching. Meeting it depends on replacing the longstanding patterns of northern countries’ selective engagement and exceptionalism with a truly whole-of-planet approach. It depends on replacing distrust and power imbalances with partnership and equity. Most fundamentally, it depends on a framework for accountability that can drive global action, global support, and, ultimately, globally shared solutions.