The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

The trade that destroys forests is worth a hundred times the money that is spent on protecting them. This will only change if the top producer and consumer countries of forest-risk commodities agree steps to shift global markets towards sustainability. We brought these countries together for the first time, to see if it could be done.

Relative to agricultural systems, high-carbon ecosystems – such as forests, peatlands, and mangroves – store large amounts of carbon in relatively small areas. Agricultural expansion often comes at the expense of high-carbon ecosystems, contributing to climate change. The food system is connected to these challenges. Ensuring no further agricultural expansion occurs in high-carbon ecosystems is a substantial climate change mitigation opportunity. The estimated costs of avoiding deforestation range from US$1.1 to US$395 billion per year, depending on growth scenarios and carbon prices; this is a bargain compared to the leverage these systems have on climate change and its social costs. Individuals, indigenous people, policies, institutions, and investments are all agents of change and will have to work together to avoid further land conversion.

Chapter 2 considers the extinction crisis, eco-collapse, ecocide, and their consequences for humanity as well as global solutions and what individuals can do.

This chapter provides us with a rich historical trajectory that begins with the catalogue of trees found in Edmund Spenser’s sixteenth-century epic poem The Faerie Queene, in which Irish forests, following a well-established English rhetorical tradition, are politicized as hiding places for Irish rebels and threaten the sanctity of the English plantation. The chapter is especially interested in analyzing the complex history of Irish deforestation in literature. Anna Pilz notes that “For Spenser and his contemporary planters, the reality of Ireland’s woods presented a threatening wilderness, precluding any form of surveillance, resulting only in chaos and danger.” She then traces later narratives about deforestation through the writings of Lady Morgan, Maria Edgeworth, and Emily Lawless, which strike new avenues for Irish Environmental Humanities scholarship, before culminating in an astute critique of the Irish government’s “Climate Action Plan” published in August 2019, which announced that “it aims to mitigate [aspects of] the climate crisis by planting 22 million trees per annum over the course of the next twenty years.

Scott’s lifelong passion for trees is the subject of this chapter. Trees in Scotland’s folklore and mythology, as individual living species, and collectively in the environments that once were the nation’s great forests, are shown to be of paramount importance to his literary and personal writing. Articles for the Quarterly Review and other periodicals, letters to correspondents, including poet Joanna Baillie, and his unpublished personal planting journal Sylva Abbotsfordiensis are explored for their record of Scott’s nationally acknowledged expertise in silviculture, his planting programmes at Abbotsford and his experiments with growing conditions. Using a deep-time framework and recent scientific discovery, the chapter looks back to the first tree species to colonize Scotland after the last great glaciation. Scott’s planting of native species and advocacy of their value to the nation is revealed as a form of environmental reconstitution. Tensions between the aesthetics of planting and agrarian economics are investigated.

The conclusion rearticulates the book's analysis and critique of how REDD+ brings forests within international financial flows by commodifying the sequestered carbon emissions saved from avoided deforestation or other forms of forest degradation in the Global South; and by potentially allowing ‘saved’ emissions to be used as an ‘offset’ towards the GHG reduction targets of the Global North. In these processes, new claims to international authority have been authorised and articulated, although these remain in many ways provisional and aspirational. It describes forests both materially and metaphorically as productive sites for the examination of questions of authority and the process of authorisation, because they have physically and symbolically been sites of contested authority. In closing, it gestures towards other possible ways we could live in and with nature, how we could live in relation with one another and how we could form worlds and our place in them.

The chapter uncovers the problem of timber following the Great Depression, and the increasing concerns of spreading deforestation around the world.

The Kingdom of the Forests gained particular attention during the interwar period. International bodies were interested in coordinating the production and supply of different raw materials to the international market, both in regular times and during crises. Immediately after the Great War, the League became interested in timber in particular. When the Great Depression started to affect international commerce, timber production was at stake as well. Accusations against a dumping policy of the Soviet Union have been heard too. This alleged policy applied pressure of its own and put other national timber industries at risk. The League wished to support these industries and encouraged the development of an international regime of mutual cooperation between exporting and importing countries.

With the merging of economic and industrial threads, environmental considerations were woven into the plot, coloring the dilemma with urgent calls to restrict forest harvest in order to stop deforestation from expanding. In the late 1930s, different voices started to advocate for the protection of trees and forests, and encouraged the League to fight back against deforestation.

These dimensions added another layer to the economic incentives and industrial interests surrounding the timber issue.

Forest policy is a wicked problem precisely because forests matter to so many different people for so many different reasons. Developing institutions to mediate among the various claimants to forest land, buyers and sellers of forest goods, and beneficiaries of forest services has proven challenging to local user groups and international negotiators alike. This chapter focuses on tropical forests, which have a disproportionately significant value for global biodiversity conservation and climate stability, as well as contributing to the livelihoods of some of the world’s poorest people. However, tropical forests are disappearing at alarming rates. There are no simple solutions to solving wicked forest policy problems, but community forestry, improved governance, changing norms, new forms of finance and technology, such as advances in remote sensing technology, are crucial to sustainably managing forests.

Soil provides the foundation for life on Earth as well as the food we eat, and is one of the most well-studied of all microbial communities. Here we look in detail at microbiomes of grassland and forest soils, and provide an overview of those associated with more extreme environments, including deserts, peatlands and tundra permafrost. We highlight the key interactions between soil microbiomes and biogeochemical nutrient cycling, particularly in the context of global climate change. We also explore the tight association between plants and the soils in which they grow, and the role of abiotic and biotic factors, such as nutrient availability, litter chemistry, plant exudates and microbial enzyme activity, in regulating those relationships.

− ESG-Agency scholarship most commonly focuses on the global arena as well as Asia and Europe, with critical geographic gaps in Africa and the Middle East.− Climate change is the dominant issue studied in ESG-Agency research, followed by forests and fresh water. − To address the geographic imbalance in ESG-Agency research, scholars need to develop research projects and collaborations in understudied regions while also recruiting and supporting scholars in those regions to engage with this research agenda.

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 9 is centered on three main pillars: industry, infrastructure and innovation. With 8 targets and 12 indicators, SDG 9 will have multiple impacts on forests, forest-based livelihoods and forest-based economies. Drawing on a comprehensive literature review, we conclude that major trade-offs will exist between SDG 9 and SDG 15 (sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems), especially if economic expansion and increasing planetary impacts remain coupled. More specifically, the implementation of Target 9.1 and its corresponding indicators (road, infrastructure and transportation expansion) may lead to irreversible and widespread forest degradation and deforestation. As such, the short- and long-term environmental and social costs of this goal need to be better assessed, especially in light of the fact that other SDG 9 targets (e.g. small-scale industry expansion (Target 9.3); access to information and communications technology (Target 9.c)) may have diverse consequences for forests and livelihoods, depending on how they are applied. We call for reforms of SDG 9 to promote and support alternative socio-economic models that are not based on indefinite economic growth, nor reliant on the ongoing expansion of infrastructure, but, rather, necessitate forests and terrestrial ecosystem services to be essential building blocks of a green and sustainable economy.

The introductory chapter introduces the Agenda 2030 and its 17 SDGs and briefly presents the process that led to its adoption. It discusses the nature of the SDGs, recognising the great variation in the nature, scope and function of the SDGs and related targets, and drawing attention to the interlinkages among the goals and targets. Forests provide ecosystem services that are crucial for human welfare and for reaching the SDGs. The chapter gives a brief overview of the world’s forests and forests’ contributions to the SDGs. Forests are only mentioned in two SDGs (SDG 6 and SDG 15). However, due to the interrelated nature of the SDGs and targets, the implementation of the SDG agenda will inevitably influence forests and forest-related livelihoods and the possibilities to achieve the forest specific targets. Understanding the potential impacts of SDGs on forests, forest-related livelihoods and forest-based options to generate progress towards achieving the SDGs, as well as the related tradeoffs and synergies, is crucial for efforts undertaken to reach these goals. It is especially important for reducing potential negative impacts and to leverage opportunities to create synergies that will ultimately determine whether comprehensive progress towards the SDGs will be accomplished.