Towards a Roadmap to Zero Deforestation 2
This second Global Futures Bulletin in the Igarapé Institute’s “Towards a Roadmap to Zero Deforestation” series advances the discussion on the COP30 Presidency’s Roadmap on Halting and Reversing Deforestation and Forest Degradation by 2030. Building on the reflections presented in the first edition, this new analysis focuses on how the Roadmap can evolve from a Presidency-led initiative into a multi-level, multi-actor platform capable of supporting implementation, coordination, and political continuity that extend beyond the UNFCCC and the Brazilian Presidency.
In April 2026, the COP30 Presidency’s open call for contributions to the Forest Roadmap mobilized significant international engagement, with submissions representing 141 Parties responsible for over 65% of global greenhouse gas emissions, alongside more than 150 contributions from international organizations, civil society, Indigenous Peoples’ organizations, and the private sector — many highlighting that the Roadmap’s impact will depend not only on its content, but on how it is politically anchored, institutionally connected, and sustained over time.
The Bulletin also argues that the challenge is not the lack of forest-related initiatives or political ambition, but the fragmentation of existing efforts across climate, biodiversity, restoration, land-use, and sustainable development agendas. In this context, the Roadmap offers an opportunity to help connect and align initiatives and implementation efforts across and beyond the United Nations system.
Three priorities emerge for the months ahead of 2026. The first is multilateral embedding. The Roadmap should progressively gain political anchoring across key international processes and agreements, including the UN climate, biodiversity, desertification, and organized crime conventions. Reflecting the initiative in resolutions, COP decisions, subsidiary body conclusions, and high-level political discussions will be important for strengthening legitimacy, broadening ownership, and ensuring continuity beyond the Brazilian COP30 Presidency.
The second priority is institutional activation. Rather than converging around a single institutional home, the Roadmap can help foster a distributed architecture built on existing UN and multistakeholder structures for coordination, intergovernmental grounding, operationalization, and political continuity. In this sense, it can function as a platform capable of connecting existing forest-related initiatives, implementation mechanisms, financing efforts, and coalitions of countries around a more coherent global forest agenda.
The third priority is localization. Translating global ambition into implementation requires engagement with regional dynamics and territorial realities. Regional and national roadmaps can help operationalize the global Roadmap as a multi-level, multi-actor platform: regional pathways can address transboundary challenges that individual countries cannot tackle alone, while national pathways can translate shared priorities into country-specific implementation strategies adapted to different forest profiles, governance conditions, and development trajectories.
The Bulletin concludes that, together with the transition away from fossil fuels, protecting and restoring forests will be central to keeping Mission 1.5 alive. The challenge now is to ensure that ambitious goals are matched by the political anchoring and institutional arrangements needed to sustain action across political cycles, COP presidencies, and global governance transitions.
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Learn more about this topic in the bulletin. Towards a Roadmap to Zero Deforestation: Inputs and Considerations.
