Global Forest Protection Requires Global Accountability

Having assured the world that it engages in the benign-sounding practice of “sustainable forest management,” the Global North has been able to get away with simply not disclosing information about what is truly happening in its forests. Counterintuitively, while there are data gaps everywhere, the biggest shortfalls in transparency and accountability are in the wealthiest countries—those funding the Global South to disclose and improve its practices. 

For example, in 2025, the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization's Global Forest Resources Assessment, released every five years to assess the state of the world’s forests, requested that countries indicate whether they monitor forest degradation and, if so, to provide their working definition of degradation and their monitoring processes and results. Only 59 countries, representing 37 percent of the global forest area, reported that they have a definition of forest degradation. Seventeen other countries reported that they have adopted definitions from other sources or have criteria for monitoring degradation. Oceania, Asia, and South America all had more than 65 percent of their forests covered by a national definition while in Africa, 37 percent was covered. Meanwhile, North and Central America had only 10 percent of forests covered by a degradation definition, and Europe, just 1 percent.

The Global North has also crafted methodologies for accounting for the logging industry’s climate impact that effectively cover up the sector’s high carbon footprint. Through creative accounting, Canada and other countries have been able to portray the logging industry—which, in Canada, is the third-highest-emitting sector—as being roughly carbon-neutral, turning what is supposed to be an equitable metric into yet another means of obfuscation. The entire woody bioenergy economy rests on this fiction.  

From there, the lobbying writes itself, and accountability falls away. 

This “trust us, we’re the Global North” approach undergirds arguments from countries (including Canada, Sweden, and the United States) and logging industry trade groups in their push for exemptions from policies like the European Union Deforestation Regulation, a groundbreaking law to address trade that’s tied to deforestation and forest degradation. Perhaps most starkly, even as the Trump administration signals a desire to open up old-growth forests on federal lands to increased logging, there’s no strong architecture—such as transparency tools, U.N.-led oversight, or market risk analysis—for approaching wood supply from the United States more critically. 

One-sided accountability has created a framework of forest governance that simply cannot deliver, as attested by the array of forest commitments, such as the New York Declaration on Forests, that are trending toward failure. 

In order to work, ambition and transparency need to be harmonized globally. Countries, regardless of geography, need to have shared, scientifically rigorous standards and avoid vague, unscientific terms such as sustainable forest management. Scientists have articulated what constitutes degradation, creating a shared basis that all countries can follow. In addition, effective monitoring, reporting, and verification systems require comparability and interoperability to drive coherent global analyses. 

Forthcoming updates to the Greenhouse Gas Protocol, a standard for emissions accounting, likewise present an opportunity for dismantling the green veneer that has shielded the Global North from scrutiny. 

Standardization and shared transparency aren’t just critical to evaluating progress, however—it’s also an economic necessity. To flourish, sustainable markets require definitional consistency and certainty. A focus exclusively on the tropics impedes the development of robust, resilient global supply chains that align with the 2030 forest goal. 

Last October, at the World Conservation Congress, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) adopted a resolution recognizing the importance of harmonized accountability and committing IUCN and its state members to mobilize to promote it. 

That mandate now needs to drive action across international policy. 

Brazil, as the acting president of the U.N. climate conference, has set itself the task of creating a road map to meeting the 2030 forest targets. To steer the international community away from another failed deadline, the road map should include concrete steps for promoting harmonized, equitable accountability for all countries. 

Five years is not a lot of time to transform policies, trade flows, and marketplace habits away from actively incentivizing exploitation and toward promoting protection and sustainability. But ultimately, harmonized accountability is what will translate the 2030 goal of halting and reversing forest loss and degradation from wishful words to lived reality. It is the critical substrate for multilateral cooperation and effective progress. It is the breakthrough we need to ensure these next five critical years don’t pass us by.