This could be the answer to tackling the climate crisis

In sawing down our ancient forests we are cutting our own throats. It is time to review our legislation so that these crimes face proper sanctions, write Boris Johnson and Iván Duque

What is happening in the world’s tropical forests – the scene of 80 per cent of the destruction – is literally criminal (AFP/Getty)

In the next few hours and days, the leaders of the world will try once again in Sharm el-Sheikh at Cop27 to avert a wholesale global catastrophe.

They must keep alive the faint – but still flickering – hope that humanity can restrict the increase in global temperatures to 1.5C by the end of the century.

They must overcome the growing and corrosive political scepticism about the ambition for net zero – a scepticism that is one of the most disastrous consequences of Putin’s illegal war in Ukraine.

Somehow, they must revive that spirit of optimism that we saw, however briefly, a year ago, when the world came together for the Glasgow Cop26. Since that historic summit, world governments have agreed measures that will take six gigatons of carbon out of the atmosphere – more even than was agreed at Paris.

The challenge of Sharm and Cop27 is to maintain that momentum, maintain the consensus and the financial commitments necessary, and to deliver on those Nationally Determined Contributions to cuts in fossil fuel emissions. And even that, of course, will not be enough.

Every day, across the planet, big yellow machines are grubbing up forests at a terrifying rate – football fields of natural habitat lost every second; ten million hectares of forest every year. This is a catastrophe in itself, since we are losing our heritage and robbing posterity.

In destroying our forests, we are eradicating the natural world, with 70 per cent of all non-human vertebrate populations gone since 1970. We are wiping out species, with 500 extinguished in the last century and a million now under threat.

We are bleaching the world of genetic diversity, with human beings and domesticated animals now outweighing the biomass of all other vertebrates roughly 20 times over. We are annihilating the bioscientific potential these forest ecosystems possess to cure the diseases of the human race. We are losing sources of water, and choking the lungs of the world, since 20 per cent of the atmosphere’s oxygen is made in the Amazon basin alone.

In sawing down our ancient forests we are cutting our own throats – because deforestation is the second biggest cause of the climate crisis, responsible for 20 per cent of emissions. A horrific negative feedback loop is in progress.

The climate crisis is causing irreparable loss of the natural world, and the loss of the natural world is accelerating the climate crisis. We need to save these habitats, and in Glasgow last year we made a start.

Leaders of 145 countries came together to pledge to stop or reverse the loss of forests by 2030. The world agreed funding to stop the chainsaw massacres: $1bn for the Congo basin, $2bn to help indigenous peoples to look after their boreal environment.

We secured agreement from the world’s biggest food and agricultural companies – including the Chinese Cofco group – to stop buying commodities from illegally deforested land. We persuaded the world’s financial institutions – with assets of $9 trillion under their command – to boycott investments that involved illegal logging or deforestation. But we must go further and faster – not just at the Cop in Sharm, but at next month’s biodiversity Cop in Canada.

What is happening in the world’s tropical forests – the scene of 80 per cent of the destruction – is literally criminal. We are talking about illegal crops, illegal mining, illegal cattle ranching and illegal palm oil plantations. It is time to review our legislation so that these crimes face proper sanctions.

We should consider what we can do to monitor these giant yellow behemoths – the machines that are doing the damage – so that they are not used for the purposes of illegal and immoral destruction of nature.

We need to signal more clearly that nature is protected. We are proud that both Colombia and the United Kingdom have joined 100 countries in the High Ambition Coalition for People and Nature. That means we consecrate 30 per cent of our surface area to the natural world.

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We hope other countries will join, and we would like to see biodiversity credits to encourage countries and governments to value the natural resources they possess. We are technological optimists.

We believe that humanity has the means to cut CO2 emissions from fossil fuels. We can clearly see a way to clean power and clean transport. But we cannot tackle climate change unless we save the great forests of the world and the natural splendours they contain.

This is not just a question of aesthetics or morality. It is a question of human survival.

Boris Johnson is a British politician who served as prime minister of the United Kingdom and leader of the Conservative Party from 2019 to 2022

Iván Duque is a Colombian politician and lawyer who served as the president of Colombia from 2018 to 2022