Plants are essential to everyone's lives. Welcome to Plantlife.
Climate change
Reducing the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere to prevent further man-made climate change is one of the most pressing concerns of our age. However plant conservation has much to offer in terms of value for money efforts to reducing CO2 and mitigating the effects of climate change.
Plants absorb CO2 for free,
conservation and restoration of wetland and coastal ecosystems will help
reduce the impact of extreme weather events, and forests, peatlands,
and grasslands lock up CO2 and help to prevent soil erosion. All of
these measures are most cost effective than man-made coastal and
riverine defences or man-made carbon-capture programmes, and must form
part of the suite of responses to climate change adaptation.
However
there is a real danger than climate changes measures such as
afforestation programmes and the growing of biofuels will have a
negative affect on plant diversity across the world. The climate change
debate must not be allowed to overshadow the loss of species diversity
and ecosystem degradation. This would simply replace one problem with
another.
Poorly implemented afforestation programmes threaten to introduce invasive species or to destroy other habitats (grasslands, heathlands and peatlands) in an attempt to grow more trees. National and regional afforestation programmes must be carried out within a transparent strategy that includes protection of biodiversity.
The growing of biofuels is also a major area of concern for plant conservation and social justice, particularly the indirect land use change (deforestation to make way for biofuel crops, the replacement of food crops) and the potential spread of invasive species. The growing demand for biofuels threatens to destroy many important habitats, for example South East Asian hardwood forests cut down to make way for palm oil plantations, or the threat to peatlands and peat forests from palm oil documented by Wetlands International.
EU Climate Change Policy and the Renewable Energy Directive
Whilst we recognise the commitment that the EU has made to reduce its carbon emissions by 2020, there needs to be greater integration of climate change policy with biodiversity policy to develop sustainable, cost effective solutions and to prevent perverse incentives such as the current biofuels target in the Renewable Energy Directive which threatens to destroy crucial habitats without bringing about a net reduction in carbon dioxide levels. The sustainability criteria for EU biofuels must be transparent, stringent and effectively implemented and scrutinised.