You're listening to TED Talks Daily. I'm your host, Elise Hugh.

Well, we can't solve climate change without forests, but we're quickly losing them to profit seekers,

because right now, trees are worth more dead than alive. In his talk from the Countdown Summit in 2021, climate policy advocate Nat

Cohen shows us how to flip that value equation. It's a model for deforestation and sustainable

growth. Tropical forests are one of the world's most important carbon sinks, absorbing over one-fifth of the emissions

from burning fossil fuels every year. The latest research suggests that without them, the world

would already be nearly one degree Celsius hotter. We can't solve climate change without

tropical forests.

But right now, instead of protecting forests, we're cutting them down.

Already about one-sixth of the Amazon has been lost,

and some scientists fear that we're nearing a tipping point

that could mean loss of the entire forest.

Forests in Indonesia and Malaysia,

even the vast forests of Central Africa,

are under threat as well.

And deforestation means carbon pollution.

In fact, tropical deforestation worldwide

accounts for almost as much emissions

as all the world's cars and trucks combined.

So losing tropical forests means losing any hope of limiting the rise in global temperatures to one and a half or even two degrees Celsius.

The heart of the problem is economic. As long as it's profitable to chop down forests for timber or clear them for

agriculture, we'll continue to lose them. Now, I'm not suggesting that we try to halt capitalism

...