Did you know the burning and slashing of tropical forests contributes 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions and fuels climate change? But conserving forests – the lungs of the Earth – can alter the future of climate change.

Tom Friedman’s new book, Hot, Flat, and Crowded, explores how protecting forests is among the quickest and most cost effective solutions to climate change. Although there are many long-term strategies for mitigating climate change, protecting forests is something we can do right now.

Until relatively recently in human history, nature kept our planet’s climate in balance. Then the Industrial Revolution brought huge emissions of man-made greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, resulting in the climate change we experience today.

To restore the Earth’s natural balance, nations of the world must work together to mitigate climate change by drastically decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and adapt to the significant warming that already is unavoidable.

That requires a holistic strategy that both cuts emissions and strengthens nature’s ability to regulate the climate and sustain life. We need man-made technology to find cleaner energy sources and production. We also need nature’s own technology – the healthy ecosystems of our planet that provide clean air, fresh water, food, medicines, and countless other benefits and services on which we depend.

For more than two decades, Conservation International (CI) has worked with partners around the world to conserve tropical forests, seascapes, and other ecosystems that are essential to the resiliency of our planet and the well-being of its people, particularly the 1.2 billion living in poverty.

Now, in response to climate change, CI is mobilizing a broad coalition of governments, businesses, international agencies, local communities, and many others to develop and implement a science-based strategy that utilizes both man-made technology and nature’s technology – the species and ecosystems that make up our planet’s biodiversity and are vital to our existence.

Our three-year goal: to ensure that the world has the knowledge, experience, and resources to help hundreds of millions of people adapt to climate change; to prevent the extinction of more than 100,000 threatened species; and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions caused by deforestation in our priority conservation regions by at least 1 billion tons per year, which is 2.5 percent of the total annual global emissions figure.