Last update: 26/01/2007

Forests and vegetation

Forests are the Earth’s most common biome. They spread out over 3.9 billion hecatres (about 30% of the global land surface) and they have a fundamental role for humankind, supplying a large and invaluable variety of services:

• they provide wood for building and fuel, fibres, food as well as medicinal substances;
• they are an immense and unmeasurable receptacle of biological diversity, hosting most of the living animal and plant species;
• this is where thousands of superior plants live, which generate physical structures and create ecological niches for animals and other plants
• they enable the recycling of mineral nutrients; provide water, oxygen and all that other living organisms need;
• they convert and accumulate great masses of carbon, contributing to the mitigation of climate changes, controlling soil erosion and regulating water;
• they intervene in the same genesis of the soil, in the cycle of nutrients, treatment of waste and biologically control the development of parassites and diseases;
• they are a place of recreation, leisure and spirituality and a basic resource for indigenous populations which preserve rare and precious cultures.

Since the early Holocene (about 10,000 years ago), 80% of forests that covered the planet has been destroyed and what is left is, to different extents, fragmented and degraded. Indeed, currently most of the remaining primary forests are concentrated in some regions, mainly in the Amazon Forest, Canada, South-East Asia, Central Africa and the Russian Federation.
In the last few years, deforestation has acquired a surprising and unprecedented pace. The FAO’s report on the conditions of global forests informs that most deforestation takes place in tropical areas (particularly in Brazil, Congo and Indonesia).