Global investors have enthusiastically embraced a national Netherlands 5.98 billion euro green bond designed to fund projects to cope with current and future climate change impacts and an advanced low-carbon economy. Much of the bond focuses on using coastal and river ecosystems as a safeguard for negative climate impacts such as high flood risk. Investors responded to the bond immediately, oversubscribing the issuance by more than 15.2 billion euros. 

This green bond is the first globally to employ resilient nature-based solutions certified using the Water Infrastructure Criteria of the Climate Bonds Standard. A consortium of organizations led by the Climate Bonds Initiative, the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation (AGWA), the World Resources Institute (WRI), CDP, and Ceres launched water resilience bonds criteria in May 2018 to inform investors about the climate risks and solutions embedded in the green bonds market. Globally, the green bonds market reached about 168 billion USD in 2018. 

Niels Vlaanderen, Policy Advisor for International Affairs at the Department of Infrastructure and Water Management for the Netherlands, commented: “We realized that we needed new solutions — automatically building flood dykes higher was no longer a sustainable solution. We had to change a system we had worked with for centuries and broaden our goals. We must future-proof our country by incorporating cultural and ecological values into our adaptive decision making.”

According to John Matthews, Executive Director of the Alliance for Global Water Adaptation and lead author of the Water Infrastructure Green Bonds Criteria, “For the past thousand years, the Dutch have reclaimed land from the sea. Today, the sea and their rivers are growing higher in a country where half of the country is already below sea level. With this bond issuance, the national government is signaling to investors the scope of the financing needed to adjust to climate change — and how we must link economies and ecosystems together to secure a joint future in a shifting climate.”

The bond also plays a role in sustainable development according to Henk Ovink, Special Envoy for International Water Affairs, Kingdom of The Netherlands Sherpa to the UN/WB High Level Panel on Water, adding, “This green bond is spot on, aimed at creating added values across the board of the sustainable development goals, leveraging investments for social, cultural, economic and environmental needs and challenges. Using water as leverage to catalyze transformative climate action.”

Justine Leigh-Bell, Deputy CEO at Climate Bonds Initiative (CBI) in London, stated, “Resilience is a powerful new target for investment. The Netherlands has just shown that investors are eager to see policymakers investing in long-term resilience and in working with rather than against nature. Using the Water Infrastructure Criteria rewards issuers and investors together, providing market and citizen confidence for innovative approaches such as nature-based solutions to flood risks.”

Niels Vlaanderen continued, “In Dutch, we say, ‘Als er één schaap over de dam is, volgen er meer,’ or ‘We need only a few to lead.’ Indeed, this bond is the beginning of a very promising area where we expect large funding requirements in the near future. We have proven that the Netherlands can shift strategies to prepare for a changing climate. With our room for the river projects, we have shown that we can combine flood protection and social values through nature-based solutions.”

The benefits of this bond are not limited to at-risk communities and ecosystems. The Netherlands’ Minister of Finance, Wopke Hoekstra, stated, “Our aim is to give an extra boost to the Dutch green capital market through the issuance of the Green Bond.”

The green bond finances low-carbon projects (renewable energy, energy efficiency, clean transportation). Perhaps the most innovative aspects of the bond, however, are projects designed to help the Netherlands adjust to climate change adaptation through sustainable water management, particularly the use of nature-based solutions and green infrastructure approaches for reducing increasing flood risks in coastal and low-lying areas.

Banner and thumbnail images courtesy of, respectively, Michael Gaida and Andželina Hanke from Pixabay.

Sizing up the (Worthwhile) Challenge of Green Living

Green living entails more than just lifestyle adjustment; it is a mindset, and until you believe in what you are doing, you’ll never be able to fully follow through. Many decry the sacrifices or inconveniences associated with green living, but if you genuinely believe the lifestyle is the correct one for you, these sacrifices will not feel like sacrifices, and these inconveniences likewise.

Cultivating a green home is not easy, but once you have committed, you will reap many rewards—including significant financial savings as well as the hard-won feeling that you are doing your part to secure a sustainable future for your family and your planet.

Selecting a Site for Your Green Home

When deciding on a site for a green home, you will need to put in some research. If possible, choosing a home in close communion with the natural world can be a great first step. Properties with ample shade trees can make cutting back on heating and cooling costs easy, and properties with gardening space offer many exciting opportunities.

Keeping your roof out of the shade, however, will enable you to implement solar panels and pivot away from electricity from the power company. And if you’re interested in any form of wind power, make sure you select an area with favorable geography and frequently high wind velocity.

To cultivate your own fruits and veggies, you’ll need fertile ground. Determining the suitability of any given property to long-term green gardening can be trickier than you might think, so bringing an expert adviser aboard is a wise move.

You’ll also need to think about where you want your water to come from. Taking advantage of natural fountains and boreholes can be a viable strategy if you put in the time to pinpoint locations with readily accessible water.

Last but not least, try not to move too far from your workplace, especially if you travel to and from work by car. The pollution that comes with lengthy auto commutes every day will run counter to all the good you’re doing at home.

Building a Strong Foundation

When deciding on the foundation for a green home, bear in mind your heat retention needs. Materials like plywood and aluminum are slightly more expensive than others, but they can pay off in the long run in terms of saving you costs on heating.

Judicious use of precast concrete can prevent rainwater from breaching the house and can help guide rainwater on the property to a central location where you can make use of it. Insulating your basement against moisture is also a key step, as the costs of dealing with mold growth can be very dear.

What Materials Should You Consider for Your Roof and Walls?

If you’re not overly worried about your home getting too cold, recycled steel is a sturdy and modern choice that will protect the structure against strong winds and other forces no problem. Plant-based polyurethane foam can be used to help insulate the structure against the chill of winter.

Precast concrete is a tried and true option that is somewhat more eco-friendly than non-precast. As with recycled steel, you’ll find yourself paying extra for the eco-friendliness, but if you can manage the costs it will pay off in the long run.

Bamboo is a natural material with extremely high tensile strength and a bold look to boot. It is well-suited to windows—key for ventilating your green home—and does not require too much maintenance (though do be sure to have any sustainable woods in your home treated regularly to avoid pest issues).

How Should You Use Your Rooftop Space?

The roof is an exciting place in a green home, offering many sustainable living options to homeowners.

If you ensure it gets regular exposure to direct sunlight, your roof can be a great place for a vegetable garden. It is also the ideal spot for solar panels, which can take in solar energy during the day that will be available to you at night.

Speaking of the sun, bear in mind that darker-colored roofs will retain much more heat than light-colored roofs. Bear the location of your home in mind when choosing a color to save on heating/cooling expenditures.

Installing a sunroof that can admit sun directly into the home when desired is another fine way to regulate the temperature in your green residence.

Living Sustainably

Getting your green home set up is only half the battle: green living is a mindset, remember, and you must hold on to this mindset once your new home is ready for action if you want the project to be a success.

If you chose the property with solar power and/or wind power in mind, be sure to follow through on implementing these technologies once you move in to capitalize fully on the advantages of the house. Raise as much of your own food as you can through gardening. You can use the leftover water from bathtubs and showers to help your plants grow, as well as collected rainwater.

If you’ve done all the hard work needed to create an eco-friendly home, you should have no problem seeking out Energy Star-certified sustainable appliances and LED lighting fixtures (where affordable). And be sure to compost and recycle what you can to cut back on waste!

Is Going Green Worth It?

The answer to this all depends on you, your beliefs, and your financial situation. If you believe passionately in sustainable living and looking out for the environment, think you can maintain this mentality moving forward, and have the money to create a green home from the ground up, why not?

It’s worth bearing in mind too that while this article details ways in which you can sculpt a green home from ground zero, the many tips and suggestions included here can also be applied in isolation if you lack the means or motivation to overhaul your current housing situation. Solar panels, rooftop gardens, rainwater management, etc. can all make for more sustainable living, regardless of whether you optimize every last thing.

At the end of the day, it’s up to you to decide how radical a change your looking for, and to make that change happen in the interest of the health of Mother Earth.

Images taken from Amanda Brown's original article.

Looking to take your first steps toward a more eco-friendly life? For most lifestyle changes, you really have to begin at home, and going green is no exception. Before you can become an eco-warrior in other aspects of your life, you must first gain control of your environmental footprint where you live. Here’s how to get started.

Save Water Wherever You Can

It costs you nothing to practice water conservation — in fact, it will save you money in the long run. You may not think that saving a gallon or so here and there helps, but it adds up. Take showers instead of baths (10 to 25 gallons vs. 70-plus). Save the water you use to cook pasta and potatoes and water your plants with it, and don’t leave the faucet running while you’re brushing your teeth. These are simple steps, but don’t be afraid to get creative!

Swap Out Energy-Hogging Appliances

There’s no reason that your fridge, dishwasher, washer/dryer combo, and HVAC unit should be anything less than truly energy-efficient. Not only is this better for the environment, but it will also save your family money. Replacing an old washing machine with a newer, energy-efficient model can save a family of four $100-plus a year, for example. Angie’s List also notes that your city/local government might offer rebates for buying energy-efficient appliances.

While you’re doing this, don’t forget to improve efficiency all around your home. For example, insulate your windows, replace your light bulbs with more efficient models, and seal your leaky faucets. These little fixes make a big difference.

Swap Out Your Cleaners

Most traditional household cleaning products aren’t that eco-friendly. Regular paper towels, kitchen sponges, and cleaning chemicals aren’t always biodegradable, can be toxic to wildlife/plant population, and may produce volatile organic compounds that can harm your family and the environment. Swapping these out for more environmentally sound options is an easy fix. Beware of generic “eco-friendly” labeling, however, as it might not be legitimate. Look specifically for packaging that is recyclable or biodegradable, and know what chemical compounds to avoid (check here for more on that).

Make Reusing Containers a Habit

Most of what resides in our nation’s landfills is plastic, and the average homeowner’s biggest plastic footprint comes from food, water, and personal hygiene containers. You and your family should commit to reusables. Simply purchasing reusable water bottles can save over 1,000 plastic water bottles and $2,000 per year. Save those yogurt and cottage cheese containers and repurpose them. By getting creative, you can make a big step toward meaningful change.

Leave Your Car in the Garage

When you think about it in terms of the environment, your wallet, and your waistline, your car is the worst way to travel anywhere. Any form of transportation — save a plane or boat — is better for the environment. This means you should walk as much as you can. You should bike as much as you can, and you should certainly use public transportation if possible. Not only will this help you make your family’s footprint greener, but it will also help you get more exercise and save you money in the short and long term.

The great thing about making your life at home more eco-friendly is that it’s not just great for Mother Earth — there are plenty of selfish reasons to do it too. It can improve the overall health of you and your family. It will make you feel accomplished. And, maybe above all else, it is cheaper in the long run. Do it for you. Do it for the environment. Just do it, period.

Jennifer McGregor is a pre-med student, who loves providing reliable health and medical resources for PublicHealthLibrary.org users. She knows how difficult it can be to sift through the mountains of health-related information on the web. She co-created the site with a friend as a way to push reputable information on health topics to the forefront, making them easier and quicker to find.

Plant photo by Matias Difabio on Unsplash. Banner and thumbnail courtesy of Dorcha.

In the context of rapidly evolving climate conditions, a new study by Bioversity International and partners addresses the challenge of climate adaptation in a way that is both scalable and targeted. Scientists demonstrate a unique approach using crowdsourced citizen science that capitalizes on farmers’ knowledge.

Crop adaptation to climate change has become an increasingly necessary and also risky task for smallholder farmers. Farmers need access to crop varieties and recommendations on the variety best suited to their local conditions. And, they need it fast. Existing approaches to generate recommendations in marginal production environments, however, lack two essential factors: scalability and ability to generate recommendations that are representative of the environments and conditions under which farmers grow crops on their fields.

A new paper by Bioversity International and partners published in PNAS shows how approaches using crowdsourced citizen science – in which farmers themselves are involved in the scientific studies – improve and accelerate variety recommendations. The farmer trials conducted in the study resulted in variety recommendations with important differences from the current recommendations.

“This work started with the idea that in the agricultural sciences we could learn from ecologists and environmental scientists who get massive feedback from citizen scientists,” explains Jacob van Etten, senior scientist at Bioversity International and lead author of the paper. Bird ecologists compile data obtained from the observations of bird watchers into a large database. This allows them to trace bird movements and understand how climate change affects migration patterns. With so many data-contributing bird watchers, ecologists can track the impact of climate change as it happens. “It occurred to us that we need a similar citizen science approach in agriculture to help farmers to adapt to climate change.”

The researchers applied a citizen science approach recently developed by Bioversity International called tricot – triadic comparisons of technologies – by which each farmer plants seeds from a test package of three varieties randomly assigned from a larger pool of varieties. The researchers organized the tricot trials over different seasons and landscapes to obtain a unique dataset covering 842 plots of common bean in Nicaragua, 1,090 plots of durum wheat in Ethiopia and 10,477 plots of bread wheat in India. Scientists then linked the farmer-generated data with agroclimatic and soil data.

The format used allowed even those with low literacy skills to contribute their evaluation data through various channels, including mobile telephones.

"We used climatic data to try to explain why certain varieties perform better than others," says Kauê de Sousa, a research fellow at Bioversity International and one of the joint lead authors of the study. "The results were very interesting. Farmers were clearly able to distinguish stress-tolerant varieties. We could also generate variety recommendations for different agroclimatic zones."

To assess what the tricot trial results mean in practice, the scientists contrasted them with existing recommendations, which in the case of the Ethiopian highlands were for modern wheat varieties. The tricot trials produced more geographically specific recommendations, and demonstrated the superior performance of farmer varieties that were approved for official release in March 2017.

The farmer-generated recommendations improved existing approaches. They can be directly translated into actionable information for climate adaptation on the ground, and can be used to create variety portfolios or, if combined with seasonal climate forecasts, climate information services to further diminish climate risk.

The novelty of this study is the demonstration that in vulnerable, low-income areas, climatic analysis of variety performance is possible using data generated directly by farmer citizen scientists on farms. The unique contribution of the tricot approach is that it integrates aspects of the existing approaches into a simple format that addresses the challenge of climate adaptation in a way that is scalable and targeted.

“This study confirms that our initial hunch was correct – citizen science can help farmers with climate adaptation. It also shows the enormous potential of citizen science in agriculture,” says van Etten. “It opens a whole new area of possibilities.”

Ethiopia image courtesy of Bioversity International/S. Collins. Nicaragua image courtesy of Neil Palmer (CIAT). India image (banner) courtesy of Thakur Dalip Singh.

Venice International University’s fifth Sustainability Symposium got underway today, bringing together dozens of influential voices from academia, government, NGOs and the private sector for an honest conversation about the challenges of achieving widespread decarbonization and ways in which to overcome them.

The introductory remarks of University president Umberto Vattani and Alcantara chairman Andrea Boragno framed the symposium in terms of the question “How?”, setting a clear solutions-oriented tone that would continue throughout the day. Vattani called the event “a great opportunity to understand how we can enhance synergies among ourselves on pressing issues,” while Boragno hammered home the urgency demanded by the threat of climate change.

The first major session of the day, which garnered wide attention on social media, was titled “How to Decarbonize: What’s Happening Now, and What’s Next on the Agenda?” and provided an informative overview of current approaches to reducing carbon footprints and innovative strategies for further mitigating them down the line.

Speaking on the alarming recently published report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Daniel Klingenfeld of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research stressed that the panel’s findings should not be regarded as mere numerical data, but as evidence of the very human cost of international inaction on climate issues. “We need to be carbon neutral, globally, by the middle of the century,” he said, rallying the diverse audience in a call to action. “We need to do more to avoid the risk.”

Bjørn Kj. Haugland, executive vice president at DNV GL Group, followed Klingenfeld’s overview of the IPCC report with a look at the evolving energy landscape and ways to accelerate the move toward renewable resources. He found cause for optimism in the rapid growth of the electric auto industry, and called on audience members to continue to push for wind power and other renewables in their respective fields, emphasizing the necessity of energy efficiency moving forward.

Timothy Nixon, managing editor of Thomson Reuters sustainability, rounded out Session 1 with a talk on the need for transparency in industry as decarbonization efforts advance. Nixon focused on the importance of cementing rapports with business leaders, noting that the key to success is “convincing businesses that it is in their own interest to move on a transparency basis and towards decarbonization.”

Session 2, titled “How Corporations Can Ramp Up Climate Action,” kicked off promptly at the end of the first. The first speaker, United Nations Global Compact senior manager Heidi Huusko, nodded to the courage of unflinching youth leader Greta Thunberg as she began her presentation, and called on corporations to answer the demands of the youth. At the same time, Huusko stressed the importance of meeting companies halfway and recognizing the strictures of the business world. “We try to have ‘commitment areas’ where we push companies to do a little bit more,” she said.

Huusko’s presentation was followed by one from Equnior ASA senior vice president Bjørn Sverdrup, who homed in on the oil and gas sectors of the global economy. He noted that shifting the energy market toward sustainability is a two-way street: “This is a journey with both producers and consumers of energy. Citizens need to take more responsibility and businesses need to innovate to make the transition happen.”

Yin Bo of the Global Energy Interconnection Development and Cooperation Organization and Ralf Pfitzner of Volkswagen rounded out the first half of Session 2. Bo communicated the urgency of implementing sustainable energy through very concrete examples, noting that the entire city of Venice—the venue for the conference—would soon be underwater absent a global commitment to change, and citing his own experience with Beijing air quality as evidence of the potential of “hydropower, wind and solar energy” to make a real difference.

Pfitzner, for his part, laid out Volkswagen-specific plans to cut back on carbon emissions moving forward, providing an illustration of the sort of corporate responsibility demanded by the previous speakers.

Session 2 picked back up at 11:30 AM following a coffee recess as Fair Fashion Founder Cara Smyth took the stage to speak on decarbonization in the fashion sector. Smyth said that the key was persuading a core group of brands to embrace more sustainable methods such that their example would lead others in the industry to follow suit to stay competitive and au courant. “The more companies are motivated, the better,” she summarized.

Up next was Paul Jefferiss, head of policy at British Petroleum, a company keen on turning over a new leaf and rebranding itself in the wake of Deepwater Horizon. Jefferiss called attention to BP’s support of the UK’s electric car industry, and expressed a desire for communion among “policymakers, corporations and the society as a whole” in the months and years to come.

Following Jefferiss was Henrik O. Madsen, chairman of the Norwegian Research Council. Madsen framed his talk on ocean life and the food industry by posing a simple question. “Fish farming is growing, and the question is: Can it be sustainable?” He highlighted the roles certain species of seaweed can play in the sustainable production of food fish, among other strategies.

Jérôme Schmitt of the Oil and Gas Climate Initiative offered further thoughts on getting oil and gas companies on board with climate action. He noted the importance of forging productive two-sided relationships with companies, rather than simply making demands: “If we want to trigger the solutions, we need to be able to provide the best solutions.”

Session 2 concluded with a talk from Herman Penng, Audi’s head of e-fuels project management. Pengg inspected the vital relationship between legislation and business practices, and pushed for more effective legislation as a means of catalyzing sustainability drives in business. “In 2050 we will have very efficient electric cars,” Penng said, “but that is not enough: legislation should be efficient.”

A lunch break led into the 2:30 PM commencement of the third session. Session 3, titled “How Finance Can Help Win the Fight Against Climate Change,” and Session 4, “How Policymakers, Citizens and Consumers Can Drive Decarbonization,” featured six speakers each, and provided a balanced look at sustainability through economic and sociopolitical lenses.

Professor Gustav Martinsson of RMIT University encapsulated well the role of finance in effecting change when he noted that “Above everything, climate change is a structural issue, and finance is the resource needed to efficiently allocate capital.” Rebecca Thomas, an associate at the investment management firm Arabesque, followed this with a call for data transparency and the standardization of data across companies.

Herman Bril, director of the Office of Investment Management at the United Nations, laid out ways in which asset owners could contribute to the blossoming of new technologies and help drive climate action, while Notre Dame professor Leo Burke described how climate-conscious investors could pave the way for robust carbon pricing legislation. Sagarika Chatterjee of Public Radio International echoed this call for investor action, saying that “Investors really need to step up to face the challenge ahead.”

Arabesque chairman George Kell rounded out the finance talks by exhorting the public and private spheres to work together on climate change: “Public and private interest often collide, but unfortunately, collaboration is not always there. We need to optimize this relation.”

The final session of the day began with talks from KR Foundation chairman Connie Hedegaard and Global Renewable Independent Power Supplier CEO Alexander Voigt, who discussed the roles of policymakers in bringing about results on climate.

“We need new regulations for transports, agriculture, energy… to restructure everything,” said Hedegaard. “We need political leadership now more than ever!”

Voigt agreed, and emphasized the part of the public—particularly the young public—in motivating climate legislation. “We should get young people to engage on a local/regional level and catalyze their energy into something positive,” he said. Jessica Cheam, managing editor at Eco-Business, substantiated this theme of youth power by sharing anecdotes of her own experience engaging and inspiring young climate activists in Singapore.

Up next was Giulia Braga, program director of Connect4Climate, World Bank Group. Braga agreed wholeheartedly with the prior speakers’ emphasis on youth, and used it to segue into the official launch of a new large-scale Fashion4Climate campaign, which will have its own website and center around the touring virtual reality experience X-Ray Fashion. Created by MANND and directed by fashion photographer Francesco Carrozzini, X-Ray Fashion offers an immersive presentation of climate crises in the fashion industry via cutting-edge technology, and is sure to get young people invested and active in the fight for the welfare of our planet.

The final speaker of the day was Princeton’s distinguished ecology and evolutionary biology professor Simon A. Levin, who offered an apt synopsis of the issues at the heart of the symposium: “The challenge is to understand how to change people’s attitudes, and how to create momentum for the private sector and governments to accept that decarbonization is crucial.”

Completing the case-study presentations was Ralf Pfitzner, Global Head of Sustainability at Volkswagan AG, who launched the second day of the 5th International Symposium for Sustainability with a deep dive into VW's approach to decarbonization. With ambitions plans in place Pfitzner emphasized: " We believe that Volkswagen is capable of bringing e-mobility to the people."

This article originally ran in the Nature Conservancy's Global Insights.

Another year down, another year closer to the 2020 deadline of the New York Declaration on Forests. In 2014, more than 50 companies, including household names like Unilever, Cargill, Nestle and Walmart, signed the declaration, committing to eliminate deforestation in four key commodities by 2020: beef, soy, palm oil, and pulp and paper. This enormous undertaking is a stepping stone to the even bigger goal of eliminating deforestation in all supply chains by 2030.   

The 2020 goal isn’t going to happen, but that’s okay. I’m here to tell companies: don’t despair.

I understand the angst that some corporate leaders may be feeling. From their standpoint, there’s only a year left before failure to meet the 2020 deadline—and before NGOs come after them for dropping the ball.

But I see things a little differently. Companies have much to be applauded for—as long as they have a solid plan in place to further ramp up progress toward their commitments.

The 2020 deforestation goals represent the first serious attempt to implement deforestation commitments. Companies made timebound plans and pulled business units in key producing countries into cross-company planning on deforestation (often for the first time). These companies gained a much better sense of their deforestation footprints, which allowed them to prioritize strategies and resources. For example, many companies decided to focus on palm oil in Indonesia, soy in Brazil, and cocoa in Cote D’Ivoire. None of that would have happened without the urgency created by the 2020 commitments.

Meanwhile, NGOs mobilized in two key areas: tools and transparency. 

Implementing massive deforestation commitments requires sophisticated tracking and monitoring technology. But until recently, these tools didn’t exist. So the World Resources Institute developed Global Forest Watch, the first monitoring platform that tracked forest loss on a global scale. It spun off Global Forest Watch Pro, which allows companies to zero in on specific supply chains in specific places. The Stockholm Environment Institute and Global Canopy Program developed TRASE, a tracking tool that allows companies to see where certain commodities are going, and which destinations are linked to deforestation in areas of origin. This is a key first step to understanding a company’s deforestation footprint and targeting actions to improve it.

Within origination countries, NGOs and companies have collaborated as never before to produce innovative tools to help implement commitments. TNC worked with the soy sector in Brazil to produce Agroideal, for example, which helps market actors identify cleared land that is environmentally suitable and economically viable for soy expansion. This relieves pressure to cut down native habitat in the Cerrado, Brazil’s vast and incredibly biodiverse savanna.

The second component is transparency. When the companies first made these deforestation commitments, they lacked the clarity they needed to implement them. For example, what definitions should they use for key terms like forests, deforestation and conversion? What are the best monitoring options? What are expectations and standards around transparency, verification, supply chain management? In response, environmental NGOs—like TNC, Rainforest Alliance and Greenpeace, and others—banded together and established the Accountability Framework to fill the information gap and produce guidance for companies, much of which has already been road-tested with businesses around the world. 

These business operation changes, new technologies and working coalitions would likely not have happened without the 2020 commitments. They generated urgency and unlocked critical funding. Now it’s up to companies to develop credible plans to follow through on their 2030 deforestation commitments. That’s what NGOs are looking for now.

So what does a credible plan look like? Benchmark against the Accountability Framework; cross-check planning against it; take advantage of tools like Global Forest Watch and Agroideal; and be sure to work with supply chain partners and governments. It takes a village to get this important work done.  

I’m optimistic about 2019, but I’m also a realist. I know the challenges. Both NGOs and companies need to do much more on beef, which alone accounts for half of deforestation globally. We need to bring emerging market actors, especially China, into the conversation. We need to be much more inventive on mobilizing capital to help farmers as they transition to zero deforestation and zero conversion production.

And since deforestation and land conversion account for about 15% of global carbon emissions, we need to do all this very quickly—before time runs out on the opportunity to control climate change.

But the 2020 deforestation commitments—and the results we’re seeing today—demonstrate that we are moving forward. As the climate change agenda and deforestation agendas start to converge, I hope to see even more aggressive action in this space—from companies and NGOs alike. We’re in a great place to get started. Let’s get to work.