The New York Declaration on Forests is a partnership of governments, multinational companies, civil society and indigenous peoples who strive to halve deforestation by 2020 and to end it by 2030. The NYDF outlines ten ambitious global targets related to protecting and restoring forests, which, if realized, have the potential to reduce annual carbon emissions by 4.5 to 8.8 billion tons of CO2 - equivalent to the annual emissions of the United States.

Launched at the Climate Summit held at UN Headquarters in New York in September 2014, the Declaration is currently endorsed by more than 200 entities including more than 50 governments, more than 60 of the world’s biggest companies, and more than 80 influential civil society and indigenous peoples’ organizations.

Climate Focus annually leads an independent network of civil society groups and research institutions - the NYDF Assessment Partners – in undertaking a general and goal-specific progress assessment towards the 10 goals formulated by the NYDF. 

The latest NYDF Progress Assessment report was released in November 2020. The report assesses progress on global efforts to end forest loss from infrastructure, mining, and other extractive industries (Goal 3) while supporting sustainable and prosperous livelihoods for forest-dependent communities, smallholders, small-scale miners (Goal 4). The report offers a stark picture of the threat that planned infrastructure corridors pose to remaining intact tropical forests, even as they are unlikely to deliver benefits to forest communities. Read the report here.

In 2019, the NYDF Assessment Partners undetook a comprehensive five-year assessment of progress toward all ten NYDF goals. The resulting report demonstrated that meeting the NYDF’s 2020 targets – including halving natural forest loss and restoring 150 million hectares of degraded land – is likely impossible. Even though forests have the potential to provide at least 30 percent of the solution to keep global temperature rise below 2 degrees, they receive just over 1 percent of overall global mitigation finance. And our forests are disappearing faster than ever: the rate of global tree cover loss since 2014 has increased by 43 percent compared to a pre-2014 baseline. Annual CO2 emissions from tropical forest loss are equal to the total emissions of the European Union. Serious corrective action is needed to achieve the systemic change needed to protect the world’s forests. 

Track progress with us at forestdeclaration.org