Despite international agreements eyeing greater reductions in deforestation, Colombia’s government plans to cut deforestation to 140,000 hectares (345,947 acres) a year by 2026 due to an uptick in the clearing of trees towards the end of the previous government’s term last year.
This is coming a week after Colombia’s government proposed a four-year, nearly $250 billion development plan, which lays out projected spending on social programs, clean energy and myriad other areas.
Part of the proposed plan includes cutting deforestation by 20% to 140,000 hectares a year, from 174,103 hectares in 2021, by the end of leftist President Gustavo Petro’s four-year term, which ends in 2026.
However, the goal published in the development plan is less ambitious than the targets published in a joint pledge on the environment which Colombia signed with Germany, Norway and Britain in 2019, which targets reducing deforestation to 100,000 hectares or less a year by 2025.
According to a statement from the country’s environment ministry earlier in the week, the government’s development plan’s deforestation-reduction target is predicated on the government inheriting a baseline of 174,103 hectares of forest torn down in 2021, while deforestation in the first half of 2022 was 15% higher than in the year-earlier period.
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The environment ministry also said the government looks to restore 1.7 million hectares of degraded or damaged forest, three times greater than achieved by the previous government.
Colombia’s agreement with the three European countries lays out total potential funding worth $366 million for Colombia on completion of certain milestones such as hitting targets to cut deforestation to 155,000 hectares a year by 2022 and 100,000 hectares by 2025. Still, it was unclear to what extent funding would be affected and from which countries.
The statement said that Colombia’s goal of cutting deforestation by 20% over the current government “is a step in that direction,” and taking deforestation to below 155,000 hectares a year “could activate a flow of finance based on these results” albeit it did not comment on potential funding for reducing deforestation to 100,000 hectares a year or lower.
Colombia’s latest deforestation target is equivalent to reducing the size of deforested areas to 50,000 hectares a year by 2030, the environment ministry said, in line with the country’s Nationally Determined Contributions (NDC) to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, published in 2020.
Story was adapted from Reuters.
