|
Our forests are in crisis.
While international concern often focuses on the many threats to tropical forests like the Amazon, big corporations with unsustainable logging practices are behind a quiet extinction right here in our backyards — in the boreal forests of Canada and Alaska, the temperate rainforests of the Pacific Northwest, the conifer forests of the Rockies, and the Southeastern wetland forests, among others.
We cannot keep overlooking the destruction of the carbon-rich forests and trees of North America, which are critical to solving the climate crisis.
We urgently need solutions — and that's exactly what NRDC's 2021 Climate Action Plan provides. But to put this groundbreaking plan into action, we need your help. Rush an urgent gift of $5 or more before midnight TOMORROW and it will be MATCHED, $1-for-$1, up to $300,000.
You can save these forests before it's too late.
Forests like Canada's boreal forest and Alaska's Tongass National Forest are home to hundreds of Indigenous communities, and the forests themselves absorb one-third of human-caused greenhouse gas emissions — yet they are being treated as disposable.
Before leaving office, the Trump administration stripped protections from millions of acres of the Tongass — the largest intact temperate rainforest left in the world — in a blatant giveaway to logging companies. And in Canada, the logging industry clearcuts more than one million acres of boreal forest each year.
And companies clearcut forests in the southeastern U.S., turning the trees into fuel pellets that are exported and burned in powerplants in Europe.
When we lose irreplaceable intact forests, we devastate communities who rely on this land, we destroy wildlife, and we lose one of our most powerful tools for fighting the climate crisis. The boreal forest alone stores twice as much carbon as the world's oil reserves, and U.S. forests absorb the equivalent of about 12 percent of the nation's annual carbon pollution.
The fact is, we cannot fight climate change without our forests. That's why when you donate $5 or more to protect our environment and power NRDC's 2021 Climate Action Plan, you'll support our campaign to push the Biden administration to:
- Restore protections for Alaska's Tongass National Forest and save it from industrial exploitation;
- Act quickly, in partnership with Indigenous Peoples, to implement 30x30, an initiative to protect at least 30 percent of our lands, rivers, lakes, wetlands, and oceans by 2030 to prevent mass extinctions, protect nature, empower communities, and bolster resilience to climate change;
- End the destruction of intact boreal and temperate forests and trees, in partnership with the Canadian government.
- Account for and regulate the climate impacts of industrial logging.
- And much more
Together, we can jumpstart a new era of powerful climate action. Will you join us today?
Sincerely,
Jennifer Skene
Natural Climate Solutions Policy Manager, International Program, NRDC 
|
