With the world facing escalating threats, forests provide solutions to global challenges.
▸ This publication provides updates on the world’s forests and examines innovations for scaling up forest conservation, restoration and sustainable use.
Although deforestation is slowing, forests are under pressure from climate-related stressors and forest product demand is rising.
▸ Recent data indicate a significant reduction in deforestation in some countries. For example, deforestation is estimated to have declined by 8.4 percent in Indonesia in 2021–2022 and by 50 percent in Brazil’s Legal Amazon in 2023. The rate of gross global mangrove loss decreased by 23 percent between 2000–2010 and 2010–2020.
▸ Climate change is making forests more vulnerable to abiotic and biotic stressors such as wildfire and pests. Wildfire intensity and frequency are increasing. Boreal forests accounted for nearly one-quarter of carbon-dioxide emissions due to wildfire in 2021. Fires emitted an estimated 6 687 megatonnes of carbon dioxide globally in 2023, which was more than double the carbon dioxide emissions by the European Union due to the burning of fossil fuels in that year. In the United States of America, 25 million ha of forestlands are projected to experience losses exceeding 20 percent of host tree basal area due to insects and disease through to 2027.
▸ Global wood production is at record levels, at about 4 billion m3 per year. An estimated 2.04 billion m3 of roundwood was harvested in 2022, which was similar to the volume in 2021. About 1.97 billion m3 was harvested in 2022 for woodfuel, constituting just under half (49.4 percent) of the total wood harvest; the proportion was much higher in Africa, at 90 percent.
▸ Nearly 6 billion people use non-timber forest products, including 2.77 billion rural users in the Global South. Data are now available on the international trade of pine nuts and forest mushrooms and truffles: combined, global exports of these products was worth about USD 1.8 billion in 2022.
▸ Projections to 2050 indicate significant increases in wood demand, albeit in a wide band. Global roundwood demand could increase by as much as 49 percent (between 2020 and 2050), driven mainly by demand for industrial roundwood, although this projection is subject to considerable uncertainty. Wood-use efficiency increased by 15 percent between 1961 and 2022.
▸ Given rapidly changing environmental conditions and rising demands on forests, more innovation is needed in the forest sector. Three imperatives will drive such innovation: (1) escalating stressors, including climate change, which will require new forest and land management approaches; (2) the shift towards a bioeconomy in which wood will be a major input; and (3) the opportunities offered by the vast range of non-wood forest products for potentially billions of smallholders.
Innovation is required to scale up forest conservation, restoration and sustainable use as solutions to global challenges.
▸ Innovation is a key enabler of progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals. It is also an important accelerator for achieving the three Global Goals of FAO Members and enhancing the potential of forests and trees to address global challenges. A vast range of innovations is already having profound influences on the forest sector.
▸ Five types of innovation are enhancing the potential of forests and trees to address global challenges:
– (1) technological (in three subtypes of digital, product/process and biotechnological). For example, open access to remote-sensing data and the facilitated use of cloud computing are enabling digital methodologies that generate high-quality forest data and improve forest management processes;
– (2) social, (3) policy and (4) institutional – such as new efforts to better engage women, youth and Indigenous Peoples in developing locally led solutions, the promotion of multistakeholder partnerships and cross-sectoral approaches in land-use policies and planning, and support for cooperatives to increase the bargaining power of smallholders; and
– (5) financial – such as innovations in public- and private-sector finance to enhance the value of standing forests, boost restoration efforts and increase access to loans for smallholders for sustainable production.
Combinations (“bundles”) of these innovation types can unleash powerful forces for change.
▸ Four factors form barriers to scaling up innovation: (1) lack of innovation culture; (2) risk; (3) potential limitations in various forms of capital; and (4) unsupportive policies and regulations. An organizational culture that recognizes and embraces the transformative potential of innovation can help de-risk innovation processes and empower stakeholders to respond to current and future challenges.
▸ Innovation can create winners and losers, and inclusive and gender-responsive approaches are needed to avoid harm and ensure the fair distribution of benefits among men, women and youth in all socioeconomic and ethnic groups. Efforts to promote innovation must consider and integrate the local circumstances, perspectives, knowledge, needs and rights of all stakeholders.
Eighteen case studies illustrate the diverse ways in which forest-sector innovation can bring about positive change.
▸ The presentation of case studies is an important means for exploring and demonstrating the potential of forest-sector innovation. Examples examined in this document showcase cutting-edge processes, tools and technologies in various regions and at various scales, providing evidence and knowledge and generating lessons that can be applied in diverse contexts worldwide. They are organized in three categories aligned with forest conservation, restoration and sustainable use.
Innovations are assisting efforts to halt deforestation and maintain forests. They include a model for fostering multistakeholder governance to scale up integrated sustainable landscape management in Kenya and Nigeria; the use of new data on the role of forests in agricultural productivity to finance forest conservation in Brazil; harnessing the power of partnership and technological innovation to reduce commodity-driven forest loss in Ghana; the introduction of new tools and techniques in community forestry in Colombia; and combining science, technology and traditional knowledge to support Indigenous Peoples as forest custodians and enable locally led integrated fire management.
Innovative approaches are bolstering the restoration of degraded lands and expanding agroforestry. They include developing a new national policy to better support agroforestry in India; integrating the socioeconomic objectives and nutritional needs of local communities with restoration to combat desertification in the Great Green Wall of the Sahara and the Sahel; the use of geospatial and other digital technologies to collate and disseminate restoration good practices and monitor progress in the implementation of the United Nations Decade on Ecosystem Restoration; enhancing the resilience of traditional water taro gardens in Vanuatu by incorporating new technologies, practices and plant varieties; improving the local governance of forest resources to deliver benefits for agriculture and forest restoration in Morocco and Tunisia; and a long-term project to link agroforestry to carbon trading in Mozambique.
Innovations are helping to sustainably use forests and build green value chains. They include delivering collateral-free microfinance to small forest businesses through the power of collective organizations in Viet Nam; using new diagnostic tools and methodologies to catalyse legal-reform processes for sustainable wildlife management in 13 African countries; harnessing digital technologies to improve the efficiency of timber-tracking and promote sustainable supply chains in Guatemala; improving connectivity along timber supply chains to reduce waste and increase the viability of sustainable forest management in Brazil, Guyana, Panama and Peru; applying new wood-processing technologies in Slovenia and the United States of America to promote a bioeconomy and enhance earthquake resilience; and enabling farmer-led innovation in sustainable forest and agricultural production through Farmer Field Schools.
Innovation must be scaled up responsibly to maximize the contributions of the forest sector to agrifood systems transformation and other global challenges.
▸ Five enabling actions can encourage responsible and inclusive innovation that optimizes forest-based solutions to global challenges: (1) raise awareness of the importance of innovation and create a culture that fosters innovation to bring about positive change; (2) boost skills, capabilities and knowledge to ensure that forest-sector stakeholders have the capacity to manage innovation creation and adoption; (3) encourage transformative partnerships to de-risk forest-sector innovation, provide opportunities for knowledge and technology transfer, and build appropriate safeguards; (4) ensure more and universally accessible financial resources to encourage forest-sector innovations; and (5) provide a policy environment that incentivizes forest-sector innovations.
