Sustainable Forest Use Helps Tackle Climate Crisis, Poverty: Report

Rome: From drinking a glass of water to building a house, forests are precious resources for people’s lives and are key to solving many global challenges, including the climate crisis and poverty, according to a new report developed by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) in collaboration with the European Forest Institute (EFI).
 
The publication: Forest Products in the global bioeconomy: Enabling substitution with wood-based products and contributing to sustainable development goals, was launched on Monday on the occasion of the International Day of Forests 2022, celebrated at the EXPO 2020 in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. 
 
The report is a comprehensive document that outlines wood-based innovations that pave the way for the use of forest products in ways that decrease environmental impact and waste generation. 

It also offers the private sector, governments, international cooperation bodies and researchers a set of recommendations to both enable and boost the substitution of products which are not sustainable from a social, economic on environmental perspective.
 
Currently 75 percent of global material consumption is based on non-renewable resources, since the extraction, transport, processing and disposal of these resources implies an enormous impact on the environment, climate and biodiversity. 
 
Wood-based products can assist with climate change mitigation by storing carbon, as the report shows, while also helping to avoid or reduce the greenhouse gas emissions associated with the materials they substitute for, such as concrete, steel, plastics and synthetic fibres.
 
"Our future is unthinkable without the goods and services produced by forests. Covering about one-third of the Earth's surface, forests provide clean water and air, timber, fuel, food. The sector employs at least 33 million people and billions of people benefit from the goods and services produced," said the Director-General of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO), Qu Dongyu, in a media release on Monday.
 
"However, the global area of forests has been shrinking in the last decades … today, only twenty-five percent of total material demand is met by biomass, including wood, the remainder by non-renewable resources” Qu said.
 
High-level participants at the ceremony included Yasmine Fouad, Minister of Environment, Egypt, UNFCCC COP27 Presidency, Siti Nurbaya Bakar, Minister of Environment and Forestry, Indonesia, Beth MacNeil, Assistant Deputy Minister, Canadian Forest Service, Vice Chair of the FAO Committee on Forestry, Jaana Husu-Kallio, Deputy Minister, Ministry of Agriculture and Forestry of Finland  Jan Thesleff, Ambassador of Sweden, Commissioner General of the Swedish Participation at Expo 2020 Dubai.
 
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