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War in Europe, economic turmoil and the impacts of COVID-19 have dominated global headlines in 2022. But climate change, biodiversity and nature loss, and pollution and waste – our triple planetary crisis – have not gone away.

Indeed, the Ukraine conflict, soaring energy and commodity prices and the lingering pandemic all point to the need for a more sustainable world. A key element of that transformation is halting the loss of nature and restoring ecosystems. And few ecosystems are as important as rainforests.

Ahead of World Rainforest Day on 22 June, we spoke with Gabriel Labbate, the head of the United Nations Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Climate Mitigation Unit. He explained why safeguarding rainforests is so urgent, the scarcely conceivable consequences of failure, and how everyone can play a role in ensuring their survival.

UNEP: Why are rainforests so critical?

Gabriel Labbate (GL): There is no pathway to limit global warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C if we don’t cut emissions from forests to net-zero by 2030 or 2035 and, at the same time, undertake a massive process of forest restoration to remove carbon from the air. This is critical alongside the rapid decarbonization of our economies.

But this is about much more than carbon. Forests like the Amazon or the Congo Basin are gigantic reservoirs of biodiversity – home to jaguars, chimpanzees, and sloths. They are also key for the regulation of water availability at regional levels. The Congo Basin, for example, influences rainfall patterns as far away as North Africa. For people living inside these ecosystems, forests are a source of income, food, medicine.

UNEP: How serious is the threat to rainforest ecosystems?

GL: There are worrying signs that some of these systems may be close to tipping points. For example, one of the most concerning articles I read in the last six months documented clear signs that the Amazon was losing resilience.

The Amazon is like a gigantic recycler, a water pump. Water may be recycled up to five times as it travels from the southeast to the northwest of the Amazon. When rain falls on trees and vegetation, part of it is absorbed, and part of it goes back up into the air following evapotranspiration.

You stop this water pump and the whole system may transform into a savannah because there is not enough water left to sustain a tropical forest. There will be a cascade of impacts following the disappearance of an ecosystem like that. It will probably be more than society as we know it can withstand.