What is the Forest Declaration Assessment?
The Forest Declaration Assessment (formerly the New York Declaration on Forests (NYDF) Progress Assessment) is an independent, civil society-led initiative to assess progress toward the global goals of halting deforestation and restoring 350 million hectares of degraded land by 2030 as set out in international declarations such as the New York Declaration on Forests (2014) and the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use (2021).
Globally, terrestrial and coastal ecosystems including savannas, grasslands, scrublands, and wetlands are all under threat of conversion and degradation. Countering this threat for all ecosystems is essential to meeting global climate and biodiversity goals. This annual assessment of global progress for 2022, however, focuses specifically on forest ecosystems. It is published as a set of four reports covering different themes: Overarching forest goals, Sustainable production and development, Finance for forests, and Forest governance.
Overarching forests goals
Global conservation goals include limiting global temperature rise to 1.5°C, as articulated in the Paris Agreement, and reducing the loss of biodiversity per the Convention on Biological Diversity’s Aichi targets. Achieving these results will require a drastic reduction in the conversion and degradation of all natural ecosystems and a very large increase in restoration and reforestation activities, which must be pursued through equitable and inclusive measures.
This assessment focuses on forests as a prominent subset of these ecosystems. Nothing less than a radical transformation of development pathways, finance flows, and governance effectiveness and enforcement will be required to shift the world’s forest trajectory to attain the 2030 goals. The 2022 Forest Declaration Assessment evaluates recent progress toward the 2030 goals and answers the question: “Are we on track?”
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