Forests are the most widespread biome on Earth, covering 3.9 billion hectares (about 30% of the global land area) and play a fundamental role for humanity, providing a wide and invaluable variety of services:
- they constitute an immense and immeasurable repository of biological diversity;
- they host most of the living animal and plant species;
- they are home to thousands of higher plants, which generate physical structures and create ecological niches for other plants and animals;
- allow mineral nutrients to be re-cycled;
- they provide water, oxygen and everything else needed by other living organisms;
- exchange and accumulate large masses of carbon, helping to mitigate climate change;
- they control soil erosion and water regulation; they intervene in the genesis of the soil itself, in the nutrient cycle, in waste treatment;
- they exert biological control on the development of parasites and pathogens;
- they provide wood for construction and fuel, fibre, food, medicinal substances;
- They represent a place for recreation, leisure and spirituality, as well as a basic resource for indigenous populations, custodians of rare and precious cultures.
This unparalleled portion of nature is increasingly at risk today.
Since the beginning of the Holocene, about 10,000 years ago, 80% of the forests that covered the planet have been destroyed and what remains is, to varying degrees, fragmented and degraded. Currently, in fact, most of the remaining primary forests are concentrated in some regions, notably in the Amazon, Canada, Southeast Asia, Central Africa, and the Russian Federation.
In the last decade – as can be seen from a recent FAO report on the state of the world’s forests – deforestation has taken on a disconcerting and unprecedented pace: 161 million hectares of natural and semi-natural forests have been eroded from the world heritage, which is equivalent to the annual destruction of a forest area equal to about half of the Italian territory. The FAO report also informs us that most of this deforestation (94.1%) occurs in tropical areas (particularly in Brazil, Congo, Indonesia).
FAO – The state of the world’s forests
It has often been said that tropical forests are the lungs of planet Earth, in fact together with the plankton of the oceans they are in fact the main producers of oxygen. Through the process of photosynthesis, the leaves of the trees act as tiny solar panels transforming solar energy and carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere into sugars and cellulose. In addition to producing oxygen, a gas essential for life, plants absorb CO2, a poisonous gas produced in large quantities by the combustion of petroleum.
