French President Emmanuel Macron outlined a new global multi-million-euro action plan for the preservation and sustainable management of tropical forests at an environmental summit that ended on Thursday in Gabon.
"We shall make an additional €100 million available to countries that want to accelerate their strategy to protect vital carbon and biodiversity reserves," Macron said in his closing remarks at the summit, noting that France will contribute half of that amount.
"More political commitment from countries and in exchange, more financing," Macron summarised, adding that he wanted to "put natural capital back at the heart of our economies."
He called for the creation of mechanisms to remunerate countries "that do humanity a service by keeping their forests intact or by 'reforesting.'
These would include biodiversity certificates that would "attest to the exemplary policies of those countries that protect their vital carbon and biodiversity stocks."
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These certificates could be exchanged with sovereign states or the private sector "as a contribution to the protection of nature," Macron said.
This mechanism is a response to the "failing model" of the carbon market, which has "drifted in recent years into a voluntary market" and "depreciated the price of carbon" with "greenwashing phenomena," the French head of state lamented.
"The great risk, if we stop there, is that mistrust will set in with regard to carbon credits," he warned.
Additionally, a scientific project called 'One Forest Vision' aims to map and measure the most vital reserves of carbon and biodiversity in the world's three major forest basins: the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin and the tropical forests of Southeast Asia.
Gabon, France and Canada have also launched an intergovernmental platform on sustainable use of wood and bio-based materials in construction, an alternative, they say, to concrete and cement.
