You can now stream GLF Forests 2025 on demand. Want to learn more about forest solutions? Join us again at Forests, People, Planet on 27 May.
This November, world leaders will gather in the heart of the Amazon to write a sequel to the much-maligned deal at COP29 last year.
These crucial talks come as projections have shown that global heating is on track to reach 2.7 degrees Celsius, or even 3.1 degrees, by 2100.
If that happens, will there be much left of the Amazon – or, indeed, any other major forest in the world – by then?
What we do in the next decade could make or break the future of our forests and everything that depends on them.
That’s why we gathered 3,000 people online and in Bonn, Germany, last week to decide what needs to be done to save the world’s forests – while we still can.
Here are five ideas we heard at GLF Forests 2025: Defining the Next Decade of Action.
There’s one obvious reason why the world is losing 10 million hectares of forest each year: governments haven’t lived up to their promises to protect them.
“If deforestation were a country, it would be the fourth largest emitter after the U.S., China and India,” said Hermine Kleymann, head of policy of WWF International’s Forest Practice.
“With 6.37 million hectares of deforestation in 2023, we are 45 percent above where we should be if we want to end deforestation by 2030, as agreed upon by world leaders at COP26.”
But as the U.S. once again withdraws from the Paris Agreement, shuts down USAID and kicks off a global trade war, could international cooperation be dead before this year’s COP30 even starts?
COP30 host Brazil believes there is still time to reverse course and get the world working together before it’s too late.
“We need to strengthen multilateralism – it’s the only way forward to tackle the climate agenda and protect our global public goods,” said Alice de Moraes Amorim Vogas, head of the Extraordinary Advisory Unit for COP30 at the Brazilian Ministry of Environment and Climate Change.
“When we talk about action, it’s not about commitments or pledges to act – it’s actually to deliver action.”
That action isn’t just a question of governments signing deals and then implementing them from the top down, though. It also means partnering with local communities and Indigenous Peoples, who have an impeccable track record in stewarding their own lands.
“Most global forest policies are very top-down, with metrics focused on carbon or biodiversity targets,” pointed out Camille Rivera, co-founder of Oceanus Conservation and a former GLF Restoration Steward.
“We need collaborations where we co-design together with local communities, because for them, success is about survival.”
So, how exactly do we bring Indigenous and local stewardship into this vision? An essential first step is recognizing and defending their land rights.
“Demarcating and protecting Indigenous lands is not just an environmental issue; it’s a major contribution to the economy,” said Celia Xakriabá, an Indigenous Brazilian activist now serving as a federal deputy for the state of Minas Gerais.
Xakriabá cited a study showing that 80 percent of agribusiness in Amazonia depends on rainfall, emphasizing that those rainfall patterns ultimately depend on trees in the Amazon rainforest – much of which lies on Indigenous lands.
“Protecting Indigenous Peoples and their territories is protecting your own life – and the planet,” she concluded.
Another important way to protect land rights is to create spaces to mediate land and resource conflicts, such as Model Forests.
The International Model Forest Network (IMFN) hosted a digital forum on Thursday to set the scene for our next event, Forests, People, Planet, which will be held on 27 May alongside the IMFN Global Forum 2025.
“Model Forests are about partnerships – collaborations among key actors representing diverse economic sectors, interests and values, brought together to manage their landscapes, ecosystems and natural resources,” said Róger Villalobos, president of the Latin American Model Forest Network (RLABM).
Max Yamauchi Levy, a project manager at EcoAgriculture Partners and member of the IMFN, raised an example from the Pantanal Model Forest, based in the Pantanal wetlands in southwestern Brazil.
In 2023, the project brought together stakeholders from local communities, NGOs, policymakers and a mining company to explore opportunities to collaborate.
“After just one meeting, the mining company had agreed to provide clean water for the community, which had been facing water shortages and contamination,” he recalled.
“With communication and integration, the first meeting already resulted in a solution for the community – a dialogue and the start of a rich process that is now ongoing.”
Forests don’t just provide us with oxygen, harbor biodiversity, moderate our climate and purify our air and water. They’re also a source of vital materials, from timber to food, firewood and medicine.
In other words, if we can conserve and sustainably manage our forests, we can reap the immense economic benefits they offer us and create a wide variety of job opportunities, too.
“Forest loss is not just an environmental issue – it directly impacts livelihoods, communities and economies,” said Paul Garaycochea, director for sustainable supply chains, agricultural and food systems at the German Federal Ministry for Economic Cooperation and Development (BMZ).
“So, protecting forests is not just a moral and environmental duty but also an economic and social necessity.”
On the other hand, if we could end deforestation and restore 350 million hectares of tropical forest, we could create 100,000 jobs and generate ecosystem services worth USD 170 billion per year, said Robert Nasi, director of science at CIFOR-ICRAF.
To achieve that, we’ll need a radical shift away from our current economic model, including a just transition towards an economy that properly values nature.
“We have a broken economic development paradigm,” said José J. Campos, CEO of the Sustainable Agriculture Network (SAN). “We are putting trillions of dollars into subsidies for agriculture and into oil.”
“We need to change that.”
The answer is simple: local environmental stewards will need vast amounts of financial support to continue building the restoration economy we need.
“We need sustained investment in ecosystem restoration,” said Christine Vale, water development officer at the Carood Watershed Model Forest Management Council in Bohol, Philippines, during the IMFN digital forum.
“Short-term projects can’t deliver long-term impact. We call for financing mechanisms that are stable and community-driven.”
“We need to mobilize not just public funding but more high-integrity private investments, both in carbon markets and working with agriculture and other commodities to become more sustainable along the whole supply chain,” added Hege Ragnhildstveit, acting director and senior adviser at Norway’s International Climate and Forest Initiative (NICFI).
CIFOR-ICRAF unveiled the results of a 15-year study on the UN’s REDD+ framework, which aims to tackle deforestation and forest degradation in Global South countries by paying them for the avoided emissions.
“REDD+ has encouraged countries to become better in forest monitoring,” said Christopher Martius, CIFOR-ICRAF’s senior advisor for climate change, energy and low-emission development.
Martius emphasized that around 100 countries were rated ‘good’ to ‘very good’ in forest monitoring in 2020, compared to just 55 in 2005. This progress hasn’t come without caveats, however.
“There is selective reporting and weak reference levels, which undermines trust and the integrity of the data,” he explained. “We also see methodological problems, and many key elements were omitted from the REDD+ framework, either on purpose or to not impinge too much on national sovereignty.”
Despite these limitations, as well as “entrenched power imbalances and vested interests,” Martius believes REDD+ remains a vital tool for climate finance that we can take plenty of important lessons from.
“Paying countries to keep forests standing was not as simple as first thought, and those mechanisms have taken time to develop,” he reflected.
Artificial intelligence is proving a formidable weapon against deforestation, but it’s also making a growing dent in our carbon budget. Can we get it working for the planet rather than against it?
As we’ve previously covered on ThinkLandscape, one of the main perks of AI is its ability to analyze large amounts of information, including combining multiple types of data, making it much easier for humans to use.
“We all probably already use ChatGPT, and with the new agentic AI, there is so much more we can do to query data,” said Fred Stolle, director of impact for the Land & Carbon Lab at the World Resources Institute (WRI).
“Soon, you could just type in ‘how much tree cover loss was there in Congo?’ or ‘how much was there in my district?’ You don’t have to be a spatial analyst anymore to have this data at your fingertips.”
In Central Africa, where researchers are deploying digital tools such as remote sensing alongside field observation, AI is helping them synthesize these different data sources together.
“Digital tools require field validation to avoid interpretation biases,” explained Stéphane Momo, a tropical forest ecologist and postdoctoral fellow at the University of Liège.
“Conversely, field observations benefit from digital tools to optimize sampling and detect dynamics that are invisible to the naked eye.”
This interdependence poses challenges in Central Africa, where field data is often lacking.
“In Central Africa, there’s still a lack of data on the ground to support the validation of these data sets to ensure that we can use them with sufficient accuracy and can leverage them fully,” said Elsa Ordway, an assistant professor in ecology and evolutionary biology at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Other potential concerns include the issues of equity, data sovereignty and the risk of job displacement, which were discussed at GLF Africa 2024 and will feature on the agenda again at this year’s event.
If there was a single common thread across the entire event, it was the importance of working together across sectors and building coalitions for forests and people.
“In the coming decade, the challenge will be how to optimize synergies between existing tools and emerging ones such as AI,” said Denis Sonwa, the research, data and impact director at WRI Africa.
“We need to take into account not only scientific knowledge but also the knowledge of local peoples. The key word here is: coordination across disciplines.”
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