By Deepu Sivadas, on 21 March 2026.
Forests aren’t just trees. They’re the quiet workhorses behind clean water, steady food supplies, fertile soil, and livelihoods for millions—especially in places like South Asia where communities lean on them daily. This year’s International Day of Forests theme, “Forests and Economies,” nails it: we can’t keep pretending forests sit outside the economy when they prop up so much of it.
The numbers tell a mixed story. FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 puts global forest cover at about 4.14 billion hectares, with net losses slowing since the 1990s. That’s progress of a sort. But dig deeper, and it’s clear the pressure hasn’t let up—conversion to farms and cities, wildfires, pests, and climate shifts keep chipping away. The Forest Declaration Assessment 2025 pegs 2024 losses at 8.1 million hectares, leaving us nowhere near the 2030 goal of halting deforestation.
Forests Don’t Fail Alone
What stands out from IPBES’s recent work is how forest loss ripples everywhere. Their Nexus Assessment lays it out: biodiversity, water, food, health, and climate are tangled together. Lose forests, and you get drier soils, erratic rivers, weaker crops, more disease risks, and bigger climate hits. It’s not some side effect—it’s the system breaking down.
In South Asia, this hits close to home. Degraded forests mean less rainwater soaking in, more floods downstream, and families scrambling for fuel or fodder. Economies feel it too: tourism dips, water bills climb, farm yields stutter. Forests aren’t a luxury here; they’re infrastructure we can’t afford to lose.
The Hidden Value We Already Rely On
Too often, we talk about forests as if they’re waiting to be logged or planted over. But they’re already delivering. Timber, fruits, medicines, grazing lands, ecotourism—they fuel rural incomes and shield cities from disasters. FAO’s messaging for 2026 ties this to bigger shifts, like bioeconomies where forest products swap in for fossil-fuel alternatives.
IPBES’s Transformative Change Assessment pushes further: our current setup—subsidies for quick cash crops, lax rules, short-term thinking—keeps rewarding the wrong things. Flip that, and you unlock jobs in restoration, sustainable harvest, and community-led management. It’s not anti-growth; it’s smarter growth.
Business as Usual: A Costly Dead End
Stick to the current path, and things get grim, but predictably so. Tropical forests keep vanishing fastest, fragmentation spreads, carbon stores weaken, and services like water regulation falter. IPBES warns that destructive funding still dwarfs conservation cash, so degradation pays better than protection.
The fallout? Higher disaster costs, thirsty cities, hungry fields, sicker communities. In a business-as-usual world, forests thin out even if raw cover holds steady, and the bill lands on everyone else. Delay just makes fixes pricier and tougher—restoring a patchy woodland beats trying to rebuild a lost ecosystem.
Rewiring the Economy for Forests
The flip side is promising. Invest in standing forests, restore the degraded ones, blend in agroforestry, and back local stewards—you get resilience plus returns. IPBES calls for real shifts: fairer governance, inclusive decisions, nature-respecting markets. Their Nexus work shows how to stack wins across sectors instead of trading them off. This means landscape-scale action: protect key forests, restore hillslopes, link farmers to sustainable chains, and track it all transparently. Ditch subsidies that fuel clearing; pump money into communities who know the land best.
Steps That Can’t Wait
At the landscape level, success will depend on using the right mix of tools. Protected areas, ecological restoration, sustainable harvest, agroforestry, indigenous stewardship, non-wood forest product value chains, and transparent monitoring each have a role, but they must be designed as part of an integrated system. Equally important is accountability: the world has had no shortage of pledges, but far too little follow-through. The gap between stated ambition and actual land-use decisions remains one of the biggest reasons forests are still losing ground.
The lesson from the latest evidence is not that forests are failing us. It is that our economic systems are still failing forests. The good news is that this is not an irreversible condition. The IPBES assessments show that transformative change is possible, and the FAO’s current framing of forests and economies points toward a future in which forests are treated as assets to be sustained, not liabilities to be cleared. But the window for gradualism is closing.
If we continue with business as usual, forests will keep shrinking in quality even where gross cover is not collapsing outright, and the resulting costs will accumulate across water, food, health, climate, and biodiversity systems. If we choose transformation instead, forests can remain among the most powerful, equitable, and cost-effective investments available to societies.
The real question is no longer whether forests are important to economies. It is whether economies are finally ready to be reshaped so that forests can survive, regenerate, and continue sustaining life.
Dr Deepu Sivadas is a Scientist with the Forest Ecology and Biodiversity Conservation Division at Kerala Forest Research Institute, India. He is also South Asia Regional Chair for the IUCN Commission on Ecosystem Management.