Climate Action
The global climate crisis threatens the survival of humanity and Earth’s ecological systems. If not reversed, the crisis will bring significant sea level rise, more severe droughts, floods, fires, and storms, all of which will result in even more extreme hunger, disease, and economic disturbance and ever greater waves of climate refugees. Natural climate solutions – such as forest protection and restoration, and sustainable land uses such as agroforestry and permaculture – are among the safest and most cost-effective measures to address the climate crisis. Together they can contribute to up to 30% of the actions needed to keep the planet habitable, along with bold reductions in emissions from industrial countries.
Rainforests are natural carbon sinks that surpass even the most sophisticated human-engineered carbon sequestration technologies. Not only do tropical forests capture significant levels of carbon emissions from the atmosphere, but they store that carbon for long periods in the leaves, trunks and roots of trees and other plant life, and eventually in the soil as it decomposes.
But deforestation exacerbates the climate crisis as felled trees are burned, releasing their carbon reserve back into the atmosphere. Rainforest Foundation US works to mitigate the climate crisis by addressing the major drivers of deforestation that put rainforests and the survival of indigenous peoples at risk: mining, agribusiness expansion, land grabbing, oil exploration and extraction, illegal logging, and poorly planned infrastructure development.