- Human society depends economically and socially on resilient forests, a new report from the International Union of Forest Research Organizations demonstrates.
- As a result, pushing forests toward collapse threatens human well-being globally, not just in communities in or near forests.
- The report authors recommend approaches for improving forest resilience, including more inclusive governance and remedying power imbalances.
- They also advocate managing for resilience in ways that include social and ecological concerns, not just the extraction of commercial and monetary value from forests.
The vital role forests play in providing habitat for biodiversity, storing carbon and supporting cultures also buttresses global society economically and socially, according to a new report by authors at the International Union of Forest Research Organizations.
But in making those vital connections, the authors also bring together data showing how humanity’s cumulative negative impacts on forests threaten both their resilience and our own.
Over time, the researchers warn, human impacts on forests are continuing to build toward dangerous tipping points that could lead to collapse and the loss of crucial services including carbon sequestration and the provision of freshwater.
“We cannot have a forest that has compromised resilience and expect it to continue to provide the benefits that we’ve come to expect and rely on as humanity,” Craig Allen, a resilience scientist and research professor at the University of Nebraska in the U.S. and a report lead author, said at its launch on June 5.
The authors also conclude that while the communities that live in or near forests are often the first to feel negative effects from forest collapse, the impacts ripple outward and will be much broader in the future.
“It’s not only the forest-dependent communities, but proximate communities and the whole planet” that are vulnerable to ecosystem collapse, said Joice Ferreira, an Amazon Rainforest researcher at Embrapa, the Brazilian government’s agricultural research agency. “We are very much interconnected.”
On the plus side, much of humanity benefits, at least in part, from healthy forests, Lanhui Wang, a researcher with the Department of Physical Geography and Ecosystem Science at Sweden’s Lund University, told Mongabay in an email.
“Forests are portrayed not only as sources of commodities but also as global public goods that serve as ‘shock absorbers,’ stabilizing the climate, water, and livelihoods for ~6 billion regular users,” said Wang, who was not involved in the report.
The authors highlight research that pulls back the curtain on the social and economic factors that can undermine forest resilience. One example comes from the Central African country of Gabon, which, according to the data, has maintained relatively low deforestation rates, even though timber production is key to its economy. However, foreign companies control most of its vast forest concessions, leaving little space for the participation of local communities.
“There is a power imbalance [there],” Ferreira, a co-author of the report, told Mongabay.
In contrast to this disparity, the authors note that, in Gabon, there are also examples of community forest and conservation initiatives that are more inclusive, alongside forest concessions.
During the report launch, Gertrude Kenyangi, executive director of the NGO Support for Women in Agriculture and Environment in Uganda, pointed to a United Nations REDD+ project in which she was involved as an example of the power dynamics at play.
Short for “reducing deforestation and forest degradation in the developing world,” REDD+ aims to improve forest management and provide economic development through community financing based on the sale of credits for the carbon the forests remove from the atmosphere.
But in practice, Kenyangi said, community members have a hard time fully participating in the REDD+ project because transportation to attend meetings is too expensive and documents are typically in languages they don’t speak.
“Market based mechanisms such as REDD+ must be people centered, aimed at enhancing adaptation to climate change and the resilience of communities more than profits,” Kenyangi said in a 2018 address to the United Nations.
The report’s authors also warn about diverging perceptions of the term “resilience.” Often, governments and businesses are focused on “engineering” resilience — that is, the potential for continued extraction of value, such as from the harvest of commercial timber.
The authors favor the pursuit of “social-ecological” resilience — by promoting diversity and inclusive governance, for example.
“The distinction matters,” Wang said. “[P]lantations can regain their canopy quickly yet remain brittle to fire and pests, whereas rewilded or old-growth stands may recover slowly but preserve their adaptive capacities and culturally valued services.” Plantation forests typically provide far less carbon storage than natural forests, which also conserve biodiversity and resilience against climate change.
In a recent study published in the journal One Earth, Wang and his colleagues lay out plans for a rewilding approach to bolster the abilities of forests to adapt. Techniques ranging from reintroducing species to drawing on deep reserves of community and Indigenous knowledge can be effective, the team writes.
The new report also describes a surge in signals coming from distressed forests that indicates they may not be able to continue providing critical services in the future.
“Deforestation and conversion, forest degradation, and climate change are pushing us towards tipping points that threaten to completely transform certain forest biomes,” Reem Hajjar, an associate professor of integrated human and ecological systems at Oregon State University in the U.S., who was a reviewer of the report, told Mongabay in an email.
Those challenges underline the urgent need to prioritize work to protect forest resilience worldwide, before it’s too late, the authors caution.
“We are at a crucial point in time right now,” Ferreira said. “Once the system is disrupted … it’s really very difficult to put [back] together,” she added.
“It will not be the same.”
Banner image: An Achuar village in the Ecuadorian Amazon. Image © Viola Belohrad.
John Cannon is a staff features writer with Mongabay. Find him on Bluesky and LinkedIn.
Citation:
Wang, L., Wei, F., Tagesson, T., Fang, Z., & Svenning, J.-C. (2025). Transforming forest management through rewilding: Enhancing biodiversity, resilience, and biosphere sustainability under global change. One Earth, 8(3), 101195. doi:10.1016/j.oneear.2025.101195
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