Nachhaltige Waldwirtschaft

It is urgent to act internationally to protect forests, which are guardians of the climate, protect soils and biodiversity, and play a crucial role in the water cycle, according to participants in a conference on ‘European and global forests: Which way for the future?’.

How do you value an ecosystem? Putting a dollar value on natural systems such as forests has long beset economists.

Forests provide “non-use values,” such as the pleasure of knowing that a natural system exists, and recreational values, such as hunting, fishing and wildlife viewing. But recently, ecologists have also sought to value a broader set of “ecosystem services,” or the goods and services that ecosystems provide to a market economy.

Tanzania has started to implement the National Reduced Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) readiness pilot projects from which the lessons learnt will be used to inform policy makers in developing a comprehensive national REDD strategy. 

China aims to increase its forest cover to 40 million hectares over the next decade as part of its commitment to cut down its intensity of carbon emissions by 40 to 45 per cent per unit of GDP by 2020.

IN AUSTRALIA, too often we're told the solution to all environmental problems is locking all native forests in unmanaged reserves, where they'll be immortal, grow forever and continuously suck large amounts of greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.