Forestry Communication Toolkit

Key messages

The world’s forests play a central role in combating climate change by absorbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere in their vegetation and soils.

Almost as much carbon is stored in forests (650 billion tons) as in the atmosphere (760 billion tons).
Forests are crucial in helping us adapt to climate change as they help ensure water availability, protect against landslides, prevent desertification and provide alternative livelihoods for people.
Protecting forests conserves the biodiversity that is vital for plants, humans and other animals to adapt to climate change.
Forests have four major roles in climate change: their clearance, overuse and degradation contribute about one-sixth of global carbon emissions; they react sensitively to a changing climate; when managed sustainably, they produce woodfuels as a benign alternative to fossil fuels; and finally, they have the potential to absorb about one-tenth of global carbon emissions projected for the first half of this century into their biomass, soils and products and store them - in principle in perpetuity.