More than 20 Leading Forestry Experts have said that if we lose forests, we lose the fight against poverty.
With the World Bank estimating that the spread of COVID-19 will push more than 71 million people into poverty and multiple reports pointing to rising forest loss and degradation globally, a new study by the Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP) on Forests and Poverty reveals that forests and trees have the enormous potential to slash poverty yet these benefits are at risk from rampant forest destruction and rarely reach those who need them most.
The reports point to a vicious cycle of forest destruction, disease and poverty and offer insight into how this cycle can be broken.
Pulling from examples from Africa, Asia and Latin America, the report lays out how forests and trees can generate incomes through enterprises like shea nut, cacao and bush mango production, sustainable logging and another forest- and tree-based industries. And it reveals how forests can offer a critical safety net for the poor in rural areas, sometimes providing their only source of water, food and medicine.
Already, more than 780 million people live below the international poverty line of US $ 1.90 a day. Around 75% of the poor inhabit rural areas, in many cases regions of high forest cover.
The report will be released on 14 October at 00.01 GMT. A virtual launch event will take place Thursday, 15 October 2020 at 16:00 CET. The full program is available here. It will feature:
- Hiroto Mitsugi, Assistant Director-General, FAO Forestry
- Mónica Gabay, National University of San Martín, Buenos Aires, Argentina
- Judith Kamoto, Lilongwe University of Agriculture and Natural Resources, Malawi
- Priya Shyamsunday, South Asian Network for Development and Environmental Economics, Nepal
A core group of 21 internationally renowned experts from nine countries worldwide and with different scientific backgrounds have worked together for almost two years on the Global Forest Expert Panel (GFEP) on Forests and Poverty.
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The Panel, chaired by Professor Daniel C. Miller of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, United States, and led by the International Union of Forest Research Organizations (IUFRO), is an initiative of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests (CPF) chaired by the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations.
Researchers who contributed to the report represent the United States, Argentine, Kenya, Zambia, Malawi, the United Kingdom, India, Denmark and Canada.
