Forests help to regulate the Earth’s climate because they store nearly 300 billion tonnes of carbon in their living parts – roughly 40 times the annual greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuels.
When forests are destroyed through logging or burning, this carbon is released into the atmosphere as the climate-changing greenhouse gas, carbon dioxide. The destruction of forests is responsible for up to a fifth of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions – more than every plane, car, truck, ship and train on the planet combined.
Conserving Borneo’s forests is vital to saving our climate. Deforestation contributes to climate change (overall, it accounts for one-fifth of all greenhouse gas emissions – which is why Indonesia is the world’s third largest greenhouse gas emitter). This is why the Borneo Project works on international policy to conserve the climate and protect forest, Reduced Emissions on Avoided Deforestation and forest Degradation, or REDD. We believe that it is vital to save tropical forests to halt catastrophic climate change, but that those policies need to benefit the communities who live in and rely on those forests.
