Despite the disappointments of 2024, the hottest year on record, hopes have been raised that 2025 will be a greener year in solving the climate, biodiversity and desertification crises.

The warmest year ever recorded followed nine record-breaking years of heat over the past decade. Last year’s unprecedented temperatures fuelled heatwaves, drought, wildfires, storms and floods that killed thousands of people and displaced millions more.

“Every broken record was not just a number, but accompanied by people losing their lives and livelihoods in ever hooter heatwaves and devastating floods. Yet new oil and gas fields continue to open with increase in subsidies as fossil fuel emissions reach an all-time high,” notes World Weather Attribution (WWA) Co-lead Dr Friederike Otto.

Life has become dangerous with 1.3 degrees Celsius of human-induced warming, according to a recent report by the WWA. The report highlights the urgency of moving away from planet-heating fossil fuels as quickly as possible.

Quoting the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, Dr Otto insists we have the technology and knowledge needed to switch to renewable energy supply, reduce demand and change transport systems.

“Implementing these is not only largely cheaper and more reliable than fossil fuels, but has enormous health co-benefits,” she adds.
Early this month climate scientists announced that the Earth’s average temperature increased to more than 1.5C above pre-industrial levels for the first time in 2024, breaching the threshold in the Paris Agreement to avert the worst effects of global warming, and sending ominous signals.

“Progress in solving the climate, biodiversity and desertification crises will often resemble a game of snakes and ladders where ‘two steps forward, one step back’ can still lead to progress, observes Eliane Ubajiloro, the Chief Executive Officer of the Centre for International Forestry Research and World Agroforestry (CIFOR-ICRAF) and Director-General of ICRAF.

Triple threat

Writing in the latest issue of CIFOR-ICRAF’s Forest News, Ubajiloro, says building resilience is a long-term process that involves many setbacks, or points of chaos, that eventually make sense when critical parts of the system start to flow and work together,
“Everything looks like a failure in the middle,” she quotes John C. Maxwell’s The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth, in the context of the triple planetary crises, the three main interlinked issues currently facing humanity: climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss.

However, despite the disappointments, Ubajiloro also sees rays of hope in the three Rio Conventions – the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCC), also known as UN Climate Change, the Convention on Biological Biodiversity, and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD), which took place last year.

Firstly, at the COP29 climate summit in Baku, Azerbaijan, the delegates discussed ways to increase finance for developing countries, which contribute least to global carbon emissions but are hit hardest by the effects of climate change, to help them cope with the impacts of extreme weather.

The annual event included an agreement to triple the amount of climate finance paid to developing nations to US$300 billion per year, by 2035. “While this figure sounds like a lot of money, it is still well below the US$1.3 trillion that climate experts say these countries need to adapt to climate change. But it is a good start,” says Ubajiloro.

Secondly, she says, in Saudi Arabia, the COP16 conference on the UNCCD agreed to create a Caucus for Indigenous Peoples and a Caucus for Local Communities to ensure that their unique perspectives and challenges are adequately represented in the work of the UNCCD.

And thirdly, in Colombia, the world’s largest biodiversity summit, also known as COP16, produced several landmark decisions, including the first-ever agreement on the creation of a global fund for collecting economic resources from the use of digital genetic data, and on recognising people of African descent and Indigenous peoples as key stewards in conservation efforts.

“These small steps forward helped build the foundations for more progress in 2025, a year with much in store for climate, biodiversity and land restoration,” Ubajiloro opines.

She says that in the International Year of Glaciers’ Preservation, global efforts will focus on protecting the cryosphere – Earth’s frozen regions – which are critical to regulating global temperatures. These rapidly melting ecosystems provide freshwater that is essential to billions of people living in or near mountainous areas.

Three COPs

In July this year, the Convention on Wetlands will convene its triennial Conference of the Contracting Parties at COP15 in Zimbabwe, where delegates will chart a course for the next three years to protect a range of ecosystems, including lakes and rivers, underground aquifers, swamps and marshes, wet grasslands, peatlands, mangroves and other vital wetlands.

In October, the International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN) will stage its congress, held every four years, in Abu Dhabi to promote sound environmental governance in a society that shares both the responsibilities and the benefits of conservation.

Then, in November, the COP30 climate summit in Belem, Brazil, will build on the progress of previous conferences of parties by ratcheting up the member states that signed up to the Paris Agreement in 2015.

The chosen region for the event, in the Amazon forest, will hopefully remind participants of the many years that have passed since the ground-breaking Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, highlighting the need to scale up support for mitigation efforts and adaptation finance for the most vulnerable nations.

Forests and trees, Ubajiloro says, can help build on the progress made at the three COPs in 2024. They contribute to community resilience, provide ecosystem services to people, support the soil’s ecological functioning and mitigate the effects of crop failure during droughts.

“Eliminating emissions from deforestation and increasing carbon removals by promoting agroforestry and landscape restoration could reduce global net emissions by 30 per cent. Over the next decade, forests could provide up to 50 per cent of the cost-effective mitigation available,” she adds.

CIFOR-ICRAF scientists are helping to combat deforestation and biodiversity loss through targeted research and engagement across all the organisation’s thematic areas, particularly through its work on tree genetic resources, restoration, sustainable forest management, as well as soil and land health.

“We are also focusing on finance through our Resilient Landscapes initiative, which envisions a world where nature, business and communities thrive equitably in harmony,” says Ubajiloro.

The venture was created to spur large-scale impact investment in nature-based solutions, acting as a bridge between science and the private sector to tackle climate change, deforestation, biodiversity loss and land degradation.

In this new year, Ubajiloro urges the global community to build on past progress and help reverse the climate, biodiversity and land degradation setbacks experienced in recent years.

She says that if forests and trees are allowed to perform their natural functions undeterred, there is still time to bend the curve on climate change, biodiversity loss as well as land degradation and stop the run of heat records in the long term.

“What might look like failure now can still be turned into a midpoint towards success. At CIFOR-ICRAF, we look forward to continuing this journey to success for people, trees, forests and the planet with as many of you as possible. Are you game?” poses the CIFOR-ICRAF CEO.