Take Action on the International Day of Forests

March 21st is the International Day of Forests. With our partners at the Natural Resources Defense Council, Friends of the Earth and the Rainforest Action Network, we’ll be taking action to protect our forests around the world.

Register to take action for the International Day of Forests

Why We’re Doing It

Boreal and tropical forests are indispensable in the dual fights against climate change and biodiversity loss. These “lungs of the earth” are among the most carbon-dense biomes on Earth, absorbing and storing carbon dioxide and converting it into life-giving oxygen and buying us critical time to transition to a decarbonized future. Their protection is essential to achieving global climate and biodiversity targets. Yet, each year, tens of millions of acres of climate-critical tropical and boreal forests are lost or degraded, with catastrophic climate, biodiversity, and human rights impacts.

Forest ecosystems provide innumerable benefits. They are reservoirs of genetic diversity— hosting the majority of our planet’s terrestrial biodiversity, which is critical for the discovery of new medicinal compounds, and essential for our planet’s overall resiliency in the face of widespread disasters. Many Indigenous Peoples’ ways of life and livelihoods are tied to the health of forests. Furthermore, forests absorb enough carbon dioxide to offset one and a half times the amount of carbon emissions released by the United States each year. Forests like the boreal store vast amounts of carbon, locking it away from the atmosphere. But, when forests are lost or degraded, carbon that trees have captured from the atmosphere and stored for centuries is released. In 2020, 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide were added to the atmosphere from tropical forest loss alone. The Canadian boreal alone stores twice as much carbon as the world’s oil reserves, and logging’s impact on these carbon stores is a significant contributor to Canada’s annual greenhouse gas emissions. In addition, much of these forest’s impacts occur in violation of internationally recognized Indigenous rights.

The consumption of products containing palm oil, wood pulp, paper and more drives forest degradation and deforestation around the world. Procter & Gamble profits from the extraction of these goods by turning them into toilet paper, tissues, shampoos and more. In 2020, a majority of the company’s shareholders voted in favor of a resolution calling on P&G to increase its efforts to mitigate deforestation and forest degradation in its supply chains. Since then, the company has failed to make adequate commitments for how it will end deforestation and the degradation of intact forests. It’s time to amp up the pressure. With enough voices calling upon P&G to stop flushing our forests, we can enact a change in the company’s practices that will reverberate throughout the industry.

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When We’re Doing It

All of March: Sign a petition, take the pledge to protect our forests, write a letter to the editor or submit a photo petition to the Rainforest Action Network to show solidarity with the Indigenous Batak People of Indonesia.

March 16: Attend our activist training.

March 21: Join in our social media storm.

March 23: Friends of the Earth Report Release