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. 

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Towards a better conservation of forest resources in Viet Nam 
Monitoring carbon stocks in Tanzania