Mainstreaming Biodiversity in Forestry

Forests are host to most of Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity. The conservation of the world’s biodiversity is thus utterly dependent on the way in which we interact with and use the world’s forests. The role of forests in maintaining biodiversity is also explicitly recognized by the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017– 2030 and in the ongoing discussions around the forthcoming post-2020 global biodiversity framework under the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD).

Global policy commitments on conservation such as the recent COP 26 declaration on Forest and Land Use are a step in the right direction but policy-makers must be inclusive of indigenous peoples and ensure that any initiatives learn from the long and problematic history of forest conservation, ar