Global forests

Forests across the world are changing rapidly and, by most measures, they are in a great deal of trouble. Many people see forests as little more than attractive backdrops to the real stuff of human history, but our human stories are intimately interconnected with forests. This chapter explores some of the often invisible links between forests and human histories. Tropical forests were never leveled by glaciation, so they continued developing as communities, becoming more complex and diverse over the millennia. Within European and Mediterranean forests, similar transformations followed the expansion of agriculture and trade. The links between people and forests were often invisible to the cadre of professional foresters who followed colonial powers around the world. Globally, since the 1950s, tropical rain forest has been reduced by over 60 percent. In some regions, the loss has been even greater. Even with continued protections, efforts to sustain tropical forests could be severely undermined by climate change.