Antalya, Türkiye — Today, the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network is releasing a new report examining key pathways to protect and steward the world’s forests, which are being lost at a rate of 10.9 million hectares per year. Reimagining Forest Restoration and Protection: Dismantling Extractive Approaches while Building Just Community-Led Forest Solutions outlines forest governance and policy gaps that must be addressed to curb accelerating forest loss and achieve effective and equitable forest protection and restoration. The report highlights examples of community-led forest solutions that demonstrate a path forward to protecting global forests within gender-just and ecocentric frameworks. The report calls on all actors to reject extractive, market-based conservation models that financialize forests and, instead, implement seven crucial pathways outlined in the report.

As governments convene in Türkiye for COP31, dialogues will focus on implementing concrete steps to halt deforestation and scale up forest financing. Global conventions, pledges, and targets aimed at mitigating and protecting biodiversity have thus far fallen short; the deforestation rate in 2025 was still 70% above the level needed to achieve zero-deforestation by 2030. Within this context, the new report centers on how the global community can change course by transforming governance and finance systems.

"Extractive economic systems, ongoing colonialism, and patriarchal norms have driven decades of devastating forest loss. Forest finance and governance systems that continue to prioritize profit and investors over people and the planet will fail,” said Osprey Orielle Lake, Founder andExecutive Director of Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN). “In order to avert biodiversity collapse and prevent additional Indigenous and human rights violations, the world must urgently address these structural injustices and pursue approaches rooted in traditional knowledges, gender-justice, democratic principles, decolonial frameworks, reparations, and collective well-being. The thousands of decentralized, community-led forest initiatives across the world offer powerful roadmaps for how we can move forward—demonstrating what genuine forest protection and restoration look like in practice."

The report finds that first and foremost, forest finance, governance, and management approaches must strengthen the land rights, leadership, and meaningful engagement of Indigenous Peoples, Afro-descendant Peoples, and other forest communities throughout all processes. Compared to protected and non-protected areas, forestlands managed by Indigenous Peoples and community rightsholders tend to hold greater biodiversity and experience lower rates of deforestation, forest degradation, and carbon emissions.

The report also underscores the critical contributions to forest protection and restoration that women in all of their diversity offer. To expand and scale-up this potential, forest management would benefit significantly by meaningfully involving women from the outset in forest-related decision-making and legally protecting women’s land rights. When women hold leadership positions in forest governance, forest integrity is improved, and community resilience is strengthened.

To channel funds directly to the most effective forest stewards, the report advocates shifting from a loan-heavy forest finance model to grants and reparative finance. Global South countries pay back $7 for every $5 they receive in environmental-finance loans from Global North countries. Instead, providing flexible, long-term grants as reparations directly to communities closest to forests and their close partners better sustains and supports gradual, nonlinear ecological regeneration.

Further analysis in the report highlights the urgency for governments and institutions to take coordinated action with local communities to equitably phase out deforestation-linked activities across supply chains and financial flows, alongside programs to support affected regions. Agricultural subsidies, for instance, result in the annual loss of 2.2 million hectares of forested land, which is equivalent to 14% of global deforestation. Redirecting these perverse incentives can unlock substantial funds for genuine and equitable forest solutions.

Relatedly, the report highlights the interlocking crises between debt distress and biodiversity loss. It calls on global governments and institutions to cancel debt without attaching economic conditionalities as a form of historical rectification and reparative justice for past harms against peoples and lands in the Global South.

The report closes with examples of community-led forest solutions. While these efforts may appear small in isolation, their collective impact, when multiplied across tens of thousands of local projects that are sufficiently supported (financially, technically, institutionally, etc), can surpass that of large-scale, top-down extractive conservation projects. These community efforts make clear that reversing global deforestation is technically achievable when backed by the necessary sustained political will.

To learn more about the report and just global forest restoration and protection pathways please join WECAN for the event listed below, taking place during COP31. Additionally, one of the report authors will be on the ground for the full two weeks of COP31 and is available for interviews.

Press Conference | Women Protecting and Restoring Forests as a Climate Solution

Wednesday, November 18, 14:00 – 14:30 TRT

Press Conference Room 2, Area D4 – Local Name: “Yunus Emre”, Blue Zone, UNFCCC COP31

Please learn more about all of WECAN’s COP31 events and delegates online at wecaninternational.org/cop31