Key Ethical Issues for Climate-Forest Policies

The world’s forests play irreplaceable roles in climate mitigation and maintaining other planetary life support systems. Yet while their protection and restoration lay at the nexus of our climate and biodiversity crises, they continue to be cleared and degraded. Here, we address three key ethical issues in forest policy that are typically ignored or dismissed. First, forests being understood as subject to sovereign owned resources for exploitation, rather than as part of the global environmental commons. Second, the trade-offs between the various forest beneficiaries and the multiple forest ecosystem services. Third, the ethics of developed countries offsetting their fossil fuel emissions through forest-based carbon offsets in developing countries. Given the absence of international agreements, we review legal action open to protect forests as part of the global environmental commons. A key ethical concern is the conflict between the short-term profits to some people that arise from forest exploitation versus the wider public good benefits from keeping them protected. Offsetting fossil fuel emissions is ethically problematic because they do not lower the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere, send the misleading message that the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels can be delayed, and place a mitigation burden on developing countries.