Countries with high levels of human well-being are more likely to show increasing forest growth. That’s the finding of a new study by a group of Finnish scientists, published in PLOS ONE. Their work shows that countries exhibiting annual increases in the amount of trees typically score highly on the UN’s Human Development Index (HDI), a scoring system that uses measures of life expectancy, education, and income to assess development status. Meanwhile, countries with a net annual forest loss typically score lower on the HDI. [...]
The authors themselves discuss caveats to their findings, and these should not be ignored. For example, switching from net forest loss to net gain may simply involve sourcing things like wooden furniture or paper pulp from abroad, often from poorer nations with weaker environmental policies and safeguards. This process, known as “leakage,” was perhaps best described and documented by the geographer Patrick Meyfroidt and colleagues in 2010. Among other examples, they illustrate leakage by looking at Vietnam, where national increases in forest cover were linked to sharp increases in imported wood, about half of which was illegal. [...]
Things can be worsened by forest restoration schemes which may have human, rather than ecological, motives at heart. In Indonesia, for example, I have witnessed forest restoration work in national parks that favored useful exotics over native forest species. In Tanzania, local NGOs such the as the Tanzania Forest Conservation Group lobby for policies that promote forest conservation over (and in addition to) tree planting, citing both ecological and well-being benefits.
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