In two blogs from the Global Landscapes Forum in Lima, the Justin Catanoso from the Pulitzer Center on Crisis Reporting featured the event in the National Geographic, portraying Unilever CEO Paul Polman and human rights activist Bianca Jagger.
Catanoso praises Polman as “one of the greenest CEOs” who understands the challenges of climate change and sustainability. He also gives Bianca Jagger credit for her engagement for example as an advocate for the Bonn Challenge to restore 150 million hectares of degraded and deforested land.
The saving face of corporate climate change
National Geographic, 8 December 2014
The man behind the podium Sunday at the Global Landscapes Forum, an offshoot of the annual United Nations negotiations on climate change being held here, spoke in blunt terms:
“Commercial agriculture accounted for 71 percent of tropical deforestation in the last 12 years. That translates into the loss of 130 million hectares (321 million acres) of forests. In fact, that loss contributes about 15 percent to global greenhouse gas emissions, more than the entire transport sector. These are the inconvenient facts.”
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Now starring as diplomat: Bianca Jagger defends forests at UN climate talks in Peru
National Geographic, 8 December 2014
…WITH A CROWD of mostly influential scientists, top environmental activists and leading figures from the United Nations, World Bank and [WWF], Jagger arrived without fanfare as the founder of the London-based Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation. …Three other panels were taking place at the same time; Jagger’s panel – “A new climate agenda? Moving forward with adaptation-based mitigation” – attracted about 100 people….
The two-day landscape forum focused largely on the underappreciated role forests play globally in slowing the rate of climate change by absorbing tons and tons of greenhouse gas emissions annually through the process of photosynthesis. Millions of acres of tropical forests around the world (which do the most work in carbon sequestration) are destroyed for agriculture, mining and extraction. The clear-cutting is often far more than is necessary and at great costs to biodiversity and the indigenous peoples who make their homes and living in such forests.
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