In a world facing economic shocks, food insecurity and a continuing pandemic, a new report highlights an effective but undervalued tool to tackling these crises: forests.
The State of the World’s Forests 2022 (SOFO 2022), released by the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) today, explains the importance of forests to the global economy and biodiversity, as well as ways to protect and scale their use in everything from agriculture to sustainable wood production.
The report lays out three “pathways” that can help build carbon-neutral economies that are “resilient for the environment, but also for the people that live from the land,” said Ewald Rametsteiner, the deputy director of FAO’s Forestry Department and a leading author of the report, in a media seminar last Thursday. The pathways include stopping deforestation and maintaining forests, restoring degraded lands and expanding agroforestry, and sustainably…
