Ukraine invasion: Crime against the planet

There was no good time for Vladimir Putin’s unprovoked, idiotic invasion of Ukraine. But this is a uniquely bad time. Because it’s diverting worldwide attention and resources needed to mitigate climate change — during what may be the last decade when we still have a chance to manage the climate extremes that are now unavoidable and avoid those that could become unmanageable. Unfortunately, what happens between Ukraine and Russia does not stay between Ukraine and Russia. That’s because the world is flatter than ever.

We have connected so many people, places and markets to so many other people, places and markets — and then removed so many of the old buffers that insulated us from one another’s excesses and replaced them with grease — that instability in one node can now go really far, really wide, really fast.

That is why I’ve argued that Russia’s attack on Ukraine is the real World War I. Two-thirds of the planet’s people can now watch it on their smartphones, and virtually everyone has been or will be touched by this war economically, geopolitically and, maybe most important, environmentally. The best way to appreciate that is by talking to people who live in some of the world’s most remote ecosystems. I’m talking about Indigenous communities residing deep inside, and protecting, the world’s remaining forests, particularly the megaforests free of roads, power lines, mines, cities and industrial agriculture. These intact forests — from those in the Amazon and Congo River basins to ones in Canada, Russia and Ecuador — are the world’s life-support system. They sponge billions of tons of carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, generating oxygen, filtering freshwater to drink and generally strengthening our resilience against the pressures of climate change.

These forests and their Indigenous people were already under pressure from global economic forces, but Putin’s war set off a cascade of negative effects: Russia is one of the largest fertilizer producers in the world. The largest oil exporter to global markets. And more than a quarter of the world’s wheat is normally exported by Russia and Ukraine, providing bread for billions of people, as well as barley, sunflower seed oil and corn. Because of both the war and sanctions on Russia, shortages and prices on these commodities have spiked, increasing pressures all over the planet to strip more intact forest to drill for oil, plant crops for agribusinesses and create land for cattle grazing.

Last week Nia Tero, a global nonprofit that supports the Indigenous peoples who are guardians of these endangered forests, invited me to moderate a public discussion by Indigenous leaders visiting New York City for Climate Week. Nia Tero points to statistics showing that Indigenous territories encompass over a third of Earth’s intact forests and similar portions of other vital ecosystems, safeguarding a significant share of the world’s biodiversity. Carbon stored in Indigenous forests in the Amazon, for instance, is far less likely to be lost to the atmosphere than that on private and other unprotected lands. Unfortunately, the more we destroy these forests, peat lands and mangroves, it also becomes far less likely that we will get anywhere near the goal of the Paris climate agreement of limiting global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

As John Reid, the senior economist for Nia Tero, explained, “Supply shocks from Ukraine and Russia become demand shocks across the world, including in the intact forests, because the intact forests are all big potential suppliers of agricultural commodities, gold, oil, gas and wood.” Reid and Thomas E. Lovejoy wrote “Ever Green: Saving Big Forests to Save the Planet,” an outstanding primer on the vital role intact forests play in sustaining the biosphere.