How To Save Our Forests and Rewild Our Planet
Most of us have a special memory with trees a childhood climb or their shade on a sunny day but we've taken trees for granted and cleared nearly half of our planets forests luckily forests have an extraordinary ability to recover across much of the globe lies a forest in the making just the slightest opportunity and trees reveal their magical ability to restore themselves and re wild the land seemingly from nothing this resilience stems from a need to survive and recover from the harshest conditions Nature can throw at them but forests have struggled to bounce back from us nothing takes down trees faster than humans we're devastatingly efficient in just 25 years we've lost over 1 million square kilometers of forest we're still clearing over 10 billion trees a year many of our ancient forests are gone where the variety of life.
Was most abundant and diverse we've also lost the forests Guardians the Predators who help ensure that plant eaters can't prevent the forests return but we need trees forests absorb carbon from our atmosphere and store it in their trunks roots and the soil they remove almost 15 billion tons of carbon dioxide each year as we clear and burn forests we release dangerous amounts of carbon back into the atmosphere increasing the rate of climate change we need to reverse this and create a world of expanding forests once more luckily for us the solution to how we restore the planet's forests is simple we just need to give trees the opportunity to draw on their natural resilience we can start by protecting those last remaining ancient forests these precious places undamaged by humans still hosts their entire natural mix of species and trees young and old from here plants and animals can radiate out to colonize new ground these ancient places need to remain standing forever most of the other forests on our planet have experienced some human impacts yet they can still be healthy and wild we can keep them this way whilst carefully extracting wood and other products and valuing them as they are by managing them well we can work with their natural resilience to keep them standing it's a fact that our growing global population will need to use more wood and that could be a good thing wood is an extraordinary renewable resource and taking it from well-managed sources benefits forests and the planet but on their own natural forests can't provide all the wood that we need so we also have to farm trees just like we do other crops and create a new generation of plantations plantations that allow wildlife to pass through natural forest corridors that benefit local.
Communities and economies and that are planted on existing cleared land so they don't replace natural forests around the world there are an estimated 2 billion hectares of degraded land where forests could be restored that's twice the size of Europe as we become more efficient farmers and adopt healthier diets will free up land for plantations and for our forests to return to re wild better farming more forests we could help nature to accelerate this global restoration in many countries people are planting millions of trees by hand there are projects that deploy extraordinary technology to speed up the natural process even shooting seeds to rewire those hard-to-reach places if we do all these things just imagine our planet in the future we'll have protected our amazing ancient forests we'll be able to harvest all the timber we'll ever need we'll have stabilized our climate and we'll have more natural forests than any of us have ever known the best thing of all we can build a future where our sitches will be filled with trees giving a shade and cleaning the air this will make us all healthier and happier because just seeing trees from a window or walking past trees on our way to work restores our minds and bodies that's the magic of trees and when you're in a forest you can feel it go on breathe you.