Protect the forest, secure our future.
Have you ever imagined how life without forests would be? Not only for the over 1 billion people who live in or close to forests and need it to survive, but also for the ones living in cities and urban areas.
Forests are so much more than a collection of trees. Forests are home to nearly 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity.
According to World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Three hundred million people worldwide live in forests and 1.6 billion depend on them for their livelihoods.
In developing countries, much remains to be done to truly incorporate the livelihoods of rural people and biodiversity conservation into land use decision-making and management processes.
Biodiversity faces severe threats in many tropical developing countries and hotspots. Tropical forests are still being converted and socio-economic disparities keep increasing to the detriment of rural areas.
Over the last few decades, forest landscapes have become increasingly fragmented. The resulting mosaic landscapes that have fragments of natural or semi-natural habitats have long been poorly valued in terms of biodiversity conservation.
At the same time, many national parks and reserves are deteriorating and in some cases, probably do not have the optimal governance structure for biodiversity conservation even when conservation bodies recognize that protected areas need to be managed as a part of their surrounding bio-cultural matrix, conflicting opinions often persist between local people and land use planners. Thus, tradeoffs must be negotiated between local and external interests.
Forests provide essential livelihoods and environmental services. They harbour a disproportionate amount of the world’s biodiversity, regulate key aspects of the global carbon cycle and weather patterns, and contribute directly to national incomes and the local livelihoods of millions of people worldwide.
Their role in sustainability transitions is re-emphasized by multiple current international sustainability agendas. Forests can be linked to most if not all of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) through contributions to ecosystem services, green economic opportunities, and social and environmental justice agendas.
Forests are also essential to the Paris Climate Agreement, the Aichi Biodiversity Targets and the Post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework. Further, the Bonn Challenge aims to bring under restoration 350 Mha of degraded lands globally by 2030, and the New York Declaration on Forests identifies 10 specific global forest goals.
Forests are a key mechanism for mitigating climate change through forest protection, restoration and afforestation. This prominent attention to forests, especially in human-dominated tropical and subtropical regions, creates a need for a comprehensive policy-oriented research agenda.
We should really thank this incredible biodiversity for enabling human developments in areas such as healthcare, pharmaceutics and, more recently, for inspiring the eco-design of products as we learn from nature’s best practices.
Let us protect our forest for a better future.
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