The World Wide Fund for Nature says a third of the world's forests are under serious threat from climate change -- with dire implications for the species that live in them.
Destruction of the world's forests releases large quantities of CO2, which form part of the greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming.
By supporting BST you are protecting the world's forests from being plowed under for farms.
If that maxim holds in ecology as well as in business, the future of the world's forests is bright.
ECONOMIST: Monitoring forests: Seeing the world for the trees | The
Three quarters of the world's forests have been cleared, degraded or fragmented due to human activity, while a third have disappeared altogether, according to IUCN.
Environmental groups have long complained that the WTO speeds the destruction of the world's forests and other resources by pressing its member nations to throw open their markets to increased trade.
They did so against the background of grim predictions of climate change in the next century, including the possibility that the world's forests could themselves become producers rather than consumers of carbon dioxide.
The report also says that the composition of the world's forests is likely to change because some tree species will not be able to move northwards (or to higher altitudes) to escape the encroaching warmth.
Robin Lock is curator of the Eden project, a recreation of a rainforest in the West of England and has worked in rain forests around the world.
Governments promised to protect forests in the Earth Summit 1992 and support sustainable logging operations in the world's remaining ancient forests.
Prince Charles has long been a high-profile environmental advocate and in 2007 set up The Prince's Rainforest Group to find a solution to save the world's threatened forests.
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"Long before the world fully awoke to the importance of its forests, Brazil had taken the pioneering step of formally establishing the need for their conservation in its legislation, " they write.
Soon enough we entered the Beagle Channel, with forests on either side, and the world resumed its familiar dimensions.
In this idyllic part of the Var region, wild boar roam the lush forests that are home to what gourmands consider the world's finest mushrooms and truffles.
In these, as in the forests of the Old World, destruction was perpetually going on.
While the story of the world's old-growth forests would appear to be one of unremitting destruction, forests lost to logging and agriculture are actually growing back in some areas, such as the northeast region of the United States and parts of Europe.
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Of the 3, 500 mushroom species in the world, 2, 000 of them have been found in the forests around the village.
"They are directly contributing to the destruction of world's remaining ancient forests, " he alleged.
But from planting the bamboo in the Zambian forests to shipping the bicycles to the concrete urban jungles across the world, the process of manufacturing the bikes is far from an easy task.
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It donates grants to organisations in the UK and worldwide, and runs a forests programme targeted at avoiding deforestation in tropical areas in some of the world's poorest countries.
Several hundred million of the world's poorest people live in and around forests.
Today, however, a range of newly popular active sports are reinvigorating the former battlefields, as travellers discover a world of ice-blue rivers, rugged hills and thick forests, which unfurls south from Karlovac to meet the vertiginous Velebit mountains that rise up towards the coast.
That, and the world's realisation that without addressing deforestation, mitigating climate change will be exceedingly difficult, has brought forests to the fore.
"Much of the world's population in North America, Europe, most of China and large portions of Russia live near temperate forests, so what happens in these forests has global importance, " said Jerry Franklin, a professor of forest resources at the University of Washington whose work was instrumental in maintaining the research plots.
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