Pillar four

Forests

Start with the truth, because the popular story is wrong. Forests are not “the lungs of the earth.”

Photo: Barnabas Davoti, via Pexels.

What a forest really does is two things: it stores carbon, and it makes rain. Cut the forest down and you do not run out of air. You run out of rain, and you let loose decades of stored carbon all at once.

In 2024 the tropics lost about 6.7 million hectares of old-growth forest, roughly eighteen football fields a minute. For the first time, fire did more of the damage than farming.

Direction can change

Worldwide, the rate of forest clearing has been falling for thirty years, from about seventeen and a half million hectares a year in the 1990s to under eleven million now. Effort works. That is the whole reason to try.

Our rule on trees

For every tree cut down, the person responsible owns its replacement: three trees, planted and cared for for ten years, with your name on them. Not an offset. If you cannot plant and tend them yourself, you pay someone to, and the trees are still yours to answer for.

And we hold everyone to account, governments, companies and ourselves, until people, animals and plants are back in balance at a level we can all agree is sustainable.

When this moves, each figure will say where the trees are and when they were planted.

Sources: Global Forest Watch / University of Maryland, 2025 (6.7 million hectares of primary tropical forest lost in 2024). FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025 (falling clearing rate).