Forest Futures - Population, Consumption, and Wood

Tom Gardner-Outlaw and Robert Engelman

The accelerating loss of the world’sforests presents one of the major environmental challenges of the next century. The growth of human population—from a few million people in prehistory to 6 billion today—looms large among the factors contributing to this loss. Yet many analyses of forest decline despair that population growth is an inevitable force that must be reckoned with but cannot be influenced. This publication challenges that view. Its purpose is not only to examine population’s role in forest loss, but also to highlight the value of population policies that simultaneously improve human well-being and brighten the prospects for conserving the world’s remaining forests.

Throughout history, and more than ever today, forests are among the most important of nature’s resources. They provide one of the most easily renewed and recycled sources of fuel and raw material on the planet: wood. Paper, still mostly made from wood fiber, remains the primary means of communication and a dominant educational medium throughout the world. Beyond these obvious commodities, forests offer a range of other benefits to humanity:

• Forests shelter at least half of the world’s known plant and animal species, a genetic
• library of unknown dimensions that could fuel advances in medicine, food production and materials development for generations to come. Many pollinators and predators of agricultural pests inhabit forests at some point in their life cycles.
• Forests help protect and enrich soils, sustain the quality and quantity of water resources and reduce the severity of floods, landslides and other natural disasters.
• Expanding the world’s forested land could help slow human-induced climate change. Trees absorb heat-trapping carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store the carbon as a key constituent of wood and forest soils.

These services are priceless—literally, impossible to price and beyond any price—to individual and planetary well-being.