Climate Change

How We Work

"In the long term, a sustainable forest management strategy aimed at maintaining or increasing forest carbon stocks, while producing an annual sustained yield of timber, fibre or energy from the forest, will generate the largest sustained mitigation benefit."

- Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fourth Assessment Report

The Rainforest Alliance works to conserve forests, ensuring that greenhouse gas emissions are reduced. Responsibly managed forestry and agroforestry projects that mitigate emissions can have great social and environmental benefits.

Certification Keeps Trees Standing

By engaging farmers, foresters and tourism entrepreneurs with sustainability certification, the Rainforest Alliance ensures that wildlife and wildlands are conserved and workers and their communities are treated with respect. Every business certified by the Rainforest Alliance and Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) contributes to responsible land management. A credible certification seal lets consumers know that the products they buy don't come at the expense of forest destruction.

Below are some specific ways that our certification programs help combat climate change.

Forestry

Forests certified by the Rainforest Alliance to the standards of the FSC provide carbon sequestration and other environmental services, even as timber and botanicals are extracted. FSC certification also...

Makes responsible forestry an alternative to detrimental forms of land use by enabling certified companies to profit from the sale of their goods to eco-savvy businesses and consumers.
Prevents emissions from forest clearing. Forests converted to plantations after 1994 are not eligible for FSC certification, nor are forests that are currently being harvested as a means of converting them to agriculture or other uses.
Promotes restorative forestry practices, which increase net forest cover.
Can contribute to forest fire prevention. A Rainforest Alliance study of the Petén region of Guatemala has shown that FSC-certified land experienced considerably fewer fires than adjacent protected areas.

Agriculture

Rainforest Alliance Certified™ farms must meet comprehensive standards for protecting wildlife, wildlands, workers' rights and local communities. These standards ensure that farms do not contribute to further forest conversion and that they protect and restore tree cover. The Rainforest Alliance is working to help farmers measure and verify carbon stored on forested farms, and start new projects to increase on-farm carbon sequestration. Read about our new guidance for reforestation carbon projects on coffee farms.

Current trends of replacing forests or other natural ecosystems with biofuel plantations compound the impacts of destructive deforestation in critical ecosystems. No forest should be cut down in order to grow biofuels crops. In an effort to counteract this problem, we promote Rainforest Alliance certification of oil palm and sugarcane, which guarantees that the crops are grown sustainably and not as a result of forest conversion -- no matter what their end use. Read about the standards for oil palm and sugarcane of the Sustainable Agriculture Network.

Tourism

According to the United Nations World Tourism Organization, the tourism industry is responsible for five percent of global carbon dioxide emissions -- 90 percent of which are associated with transport, six percent with lodging, and four percent with local activities -- and if action is not taken, these emissions could grow by 150 percent in the next 30 years.

The Rainforest Alliance has provided training and technical assistance to more than 1,500 tourism entrepreneurs interested in becoming more sustainable, and we now offer training in the management of greenhouse gas emissions. We also help tourism businesses find offsets for those emissions that they cannot eliminate.

Carbon Projects that Work

The Rainforest Alliance provides a range of verification services to confirm that carbon projects are conservation-oriented and meet established international standards for carbon sequestration. This enables company- and community-run projects to benefit from payments for carbon credits they produce and offers them an added incentive to manage their land sustainably. Read more about forest carbon standards.

Seeing the Forest for the Trees

The Rainforest Alliance helps train local organizations on the development and design of effective forestry and agroforestry-based carbon sequestration projects. We also encourage governments to adopt climate policies that reward the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions through forest conservation and reforestation, address all of the causes of deforestation, and which provide maximum benefit to forest-dwelling peoples.