More People Need More Forests

The Economist has a special section on forests--"the world's lungs." For the past 10,000 years we have been cutting down forests in order to clear the land for agriculture in order to support an ever larger (and generally better fed) population. More recently, we have intensified the "development" of land in order to raise cattle, and to grow plants for fiber and biofuels, not just food.

Across the world, forests and the soil beneath them absorb about a quarter of all carbon emissions.

This is an indispensable contribution to life as we know it, and forests offer many others, too. They house more than half the world’s species of animals, birds and insects...Indeed, the more that people learn about forests, the more perilous their mismanagement seems.

That forests regulate water run-off, mitigating risks of flooding and drought, has been recognised since ancient times. The ancients also understood that trees can increase rainfall and deforestation can reduce it. Cutting down trees leads to a reduction in evapotranspiration, which results in less downwind precipitation.

For these and many other reasons, the forests help to sustain life on the planet. Yet, there are significant threats to the forest. One is global climate change, and the second is closely related to global climate change--population growth and the demand for food and other agricultural products.

There are no easy fixes to the forest problem. It is hard enough to preserve what we have, much less to try to increase the fraction of the earth covered by forest back to something even a little closer to what it was a few thousand years ago. A small, but incredibly important part of the solution--a goal of the Economist special report--is awareness of the problem: Awareness of how huge an issue this is and that we are going to have to pay for it, whether we like it or not. The Economist opines that "eco-concerned consumers may want sustainable products, but they do not want to pay more for them." The marketplace does not work well when we can't quantify the true costs of what we extract from nature.