COP26: UK claims to lead governments in new nature pledges

Forty five governments at the UN climate summit in Glasgow have today pledged ‘urgent action’ and financial investment to protect nature and move to sustainable farming at the COP26 Nature and Land-Use Day.

Kirtana Chandrasekaran, Friends of the Earth International food sovereignty campaigner, said:

“These schemes are trying to open up vast areas of agriculture, forests and oceans to act as carbon offsets which enable polluting business-as-usual. That is completely unacceptable and not what we need to be seeing from COP26. Worse still, many of them are re-packaging false solutions like carbon markets, voluntary certification, and industrial farming as climate action. When these announcements are made, it is always with a view to making the money on offer look like a solution, but really it isn’t." 

"Instead, this will unleash more land grabbing, displacement of indigenous peoples and local communities who are the real guardians of biodiversity and providers of climate solutions. The real solutions lie in ending fossil fuel extraction, getting binding regulations to stop deforestation and industrial farming, and instead fund real solutions like agroecology which means to farm in harmony with nature, and community management of forests.”

 ENDS