Our world as we know it is facing multiple existential threats. Greenhouse gas emissions
are causing global warming and increasing the frequency and severity of floods,
droughts, and heat waves. Habitat destruction, along with wildlife trade and consumption,
are wiping out species essential to ecosystem resilience. On top of that scientists are warning
us that deadly pandemics like Covid-19 will occur with increasing frequency.
Global leaders are struggling to address these three enormous and intertwined crises
of climate change, biodiversity loss, and future pandemics. These are humanity's most
urgent challenges and yet we are overlooking a common solution that will help us solve all
three at once – protecting our remaining intact forests. The world's forests slow global warming
by absorbing and storing carbon in their trees, soils, and peatlands. The carbon stored in today's
intact forests is equivalent to roughly 10 years worth of emissions caused by humans.
Furthermore, intact forests absorb about one-fifth of the greenhouse gases that we emit annually.
Keeping forests intact is essential to reaching the Paris agreement's goal
of preventing global warming from exceeding 1.5 degrees celsius by 2030. The vast majority
of the world's land-based species are found in forests. Species are often unable to subsist in
the small fragments of forested land left behind after deforestation. Maintaining intact forests
is therefore essential to avoid serious disturbances to the complex web of life.
Protecting forests will also help prevent the source of global pandemics –
the spillover of viruses from wild animals into humans. Nearly all global pandemics
of the past century originated in wildlife. Most importantly, scientists overwhelmingly agree that
animal-to-human spillover will be the most likely cause of the next pandemic. When people move into
forested regions to clear land for agriculture and cattle rearing, to extract timber and minerals and
to build roads and new frontier towns, they are increasing the probability of contact
between humans and wild animals that may harbor new diseases. The risk is highest in tropical
and subtropical areas where there is greater biodiversity. This can lead to the spillover of
novel viruses, localized disease outbreaks, and potentially, the next global pandemic
It is clear that protecting remaining intact forests can mitigate the risk
of three major crises – climate change, biodiversity loss, and emerging diseases.
The good news is that effective and proven solutions to protect forests already exist – many
of them spearheaded by local communities and indigenous peoples, who are the original
guardians of these precious ecosystems. Our task now is to scale these solutions worldwide.
We can only do this by truly recognizing the value of these forests and mobilizing
the money needed to enable governments, communities, and landowners to protect them.
Forests are more than just tree-covered landscapes. They are complex networks of living
and non-living elements, large enough to sustain entire ecosystem functions.
If we fail to protect forests, we do so at our own peril.
There is no backup plan – no alternative that can restore the many benefits that they provide.
Forests are what stand between us and a future of unchecked climate change, biodiversity loss,
and deadly pandemics. We must protect them for our planet, for our health, and for our children.