Deforestation: there's no good news

From the Economist:

Some 67,000km² of virgin rainforest were destroyed last year [ie 2024], an area roughly the size of Ireland and nearly twice as much as was cleared in 2023. A pledge made by world leaders at the COP climate conference in 2021 to halt deforestation by 2030 is nowhere close to being fulfilled: despite fluctuations, the pace of global deforestation is roughly the same as it was at the beginning of the decade. To save the world’s tropical forests, learn from Brazil, the Economist, 23 October 2025

The article tries to be positive: the rate of deforestation was falling before recent wildfires, and Brazil is making more effort to protect indigenous reserves and establish property rights. But the overall picture is undeniably gloomy, much as it is with almost all of humanity's environmental depredations. 

As well as deforestation, with all its attendant dangers, we are facing biodiversity loss, overfishing, water and air pollution, and the impacts of climate change. But we can't expect policymakers, in Brazil or elsewhere, to weigh up all the impacts of our activities and price or regulate them accordingly, and to do so on a continuous basis to ensure that policy keeps up with scientific advances and the growth of our knowledge about ecological relationships.

So I propose a different method. The current system, at its best, reacts to problems when they become politically unavoidable, and then tries to identify and address their causes. My suggestion would be instead to specify acceptable ranges of indicators of environmental health, including human, animal and plant health, and supply incentives for people to ensure that the targeted indicators remain within those ranges for a sustained period. In short, to target broad environmental goals and reward those who achieve them.

My suggested way of doing this at the national level would be for the government to issue Environmental Policy Bonds. These bonds would not bear interest, but would be redeemable once the specified environmental targets had been achieved and sustained. The bonds would be tradeable and, could have a very long-term focus, encouraging people to research, refine and undertake activities directed toward one or all of the targeted goals. In this, and in other ways, they would have several advantages over current policymaking:

• We'd be targeting outcomes, for which there is more consensus than for the means to achieve them.  
•  People can identify more readily with explicit environmental goals than with the means to achieve them, which means that there would be more engagement with the public when developing environmental policy, which in turns means more buy-in, which I consider to be essential. 
• The target outcomes would be stable and have a very long-term focus: essential if we are to encourage new ways of achieving our environmental goals. 

If national governments successfully implemented Environmental Policy Bonds, they could conceivably collectively issue bonds targeting global environmental objectives, encompassing, for example, the health of the seas and atmospheric pollution as well as climate change and biodiversity loss. I have to admit that that looks extremely unlikely, especially as the concept has been in the public arena now for more than thirty years, and only a non-tradeable variant (Social Impact Bonds) has so far been tried. As I explain here and here tradeability is absolutely necessary if we want to achieve broad, long-term goals. Perhaps, rather than wait for government to change the way it does things, we should try to engage with philanthropists. I have tried to do this, but with no success.