1. Besides providing habitats for animals and livelihoods for humans, forests also offer watershed protection, prevent soil erosion and mitigate climate change
2. After oceans, forests are the world’s largest storehouses of carbon.
They provide ecosystem services that are critical to human welfare. These include:
-Absorbing harmful greenhouse gasses that produce climate change. In tropical forests alone, a quarter of a trillion tons of carbon is stored in above and below ground biomass
-Providing clean water for drinking, bathing, and other household needs
-Protecting watersheds and reducing or slowing the amount of erosion and chemicals that reach waterways
-Providing food and medicine
-Serving as a buffer in natural disasters like flood and rainfalls
-Providing habitat to more than half of the world’s land-based species
