Forests serve as sources of timber, food, medicine, and clean water for billions of people, while simultaneously regulating the global climate and housing roughly 80% of all land-based species. Around 350 million people worldwide depend directly on forests for their day-to-day survival and income, but the benefits extend to virtually everyone on the planet.
Timber and Wood Products
The most visible use of forests is producing wood. Lumber for construction, pulp for paper, plywood, packaging, and fuel wood all come from managed and natural forests. The global forest products market was valued at approximately $800 billion in 2024 and is expected to surpass $950 billion by 2030. That figure covers everything from raw logs to finished furniture, engineered wood panels, and cellulose-based textiles.
Wood remains one of the most widely used building materials on Earth, prized because it’s renewable, lightweight relative to its strength, and acts as a long-term carbon store even after it’s been milled. In many developing countries, wood and charcoal are still the primary cooking and heating fuels. The FAO estimates that roughly half of all wood removed from forests globally is burned for energy rather than processed into products.
Non-Timber Products
Beyond lumber, forests supply a huge range of goods that never require felling a tree. Edible nuts, wild mushrooms, berries, game meat, honey, herbs, and spices all come from forest ecosystems. So do materials like natural rubber (latex), cork, bamboo, rattan for furniture, resins, gums, and plant-based dyes. Many of these products are staples of local economies in tropical and temperate regions alike.
Cork, for example, is harvested from the bark of a Mediterranean oak without killing the tree. Brazil nuts can only be commercially gathered from wild trees in the Amazon because the species resists plantation cultivation. Maple syrup, wild blueberries, and dozens of medicinal herbs are forest products that most people encounter regularly without thinking of them that way.
Medicine From Forest Plants
A surprising number of modern pharmaceuticals trace their origins to compounds first found in forest plants. Quinine, still used to treat malaria, was originally isolated from the bark of the cinchona tree in the Andean rainforests, where indigenous Quechua people had used it medicinally for generations. Vincristine and vinblastine, two chemotherapy drugs used to treat childhood leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease, come from the rosy periwinkle, a plant native to Madagascar’s rainforests. A compound used to treat glaucoma was first extracted from calabar beans in the tropical forests of West Africa.
More recently, researchers identified Calanolide A, a compound with activity against HIV, in a rare tree species found only in the rainforests of Sarawak, Malaysia. That discovery nearly didn’t happen: when scientists returned to collect more samples, the original tree had been logged. A related compound, Calanolide B, was later found in a different species in the same region. These cases illustrate why conserving forest biodiversity has direct implications for human health. Scientists estimate that only a small fraction of tropical plant species have been screened for medicinal properties.
Climate Regulation
Forests are one of the planet’s most important climate tools. They absorb approximately 2.6 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere each year, pulling carbon out of the air through photosynthesis and locking it into wood, roots, and soil. When forests are cleared or burned, that stored carbon is released, accelerating warming.
The climate role of forests goes beyond carbon storage. Trees release water vapor through their leaves in a process called evapotranspiration, which cools the surrounding air much like sweat cools skin. Tropical forests, in particular, generate their own rainfall patterns. Removing them tends to raise local temperatures. Research published in Nature Communications found that deforestation in the tropics leads to warming, partly because the loss of tree cover also reduces cloud formation. Fewer low-lying clouds means less sunlight reflected away from the surface, compounding the heating effect. In boreal (far-northern) forests, the picture is more complex: snow-covered open ground reflects more sunlight than dark evergreen canopy, so the temperature effects of deforestation vary by latitude.
Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services
Forests harbor an extraordinary concentration of life. According to the World Health Organization, forest ecosystems store 80% of all terrestrial biodiversity. That includes not only large mammals and birds but insects, fungi, microorganisms, and plant species that form interconnected food webs. Tropical rainforests are the most species-rich, but temperate and boreal forests also support unique communities of wildlife found nowhere else.
This biodiversity isn’t just an abstract value. Forests provide ecosystem services that underpin agriculture and human settlements far beyond their borders. They filter and regulate freshwater supplies for downstream communities. Tree roots stabilize soil on hillsides, reducing landslides and erosion. Forests along coastlines and riverbanks buffer against flooding. Pollinators that nest in forest edges service nearby farms. When these ecosystems degrade, replacing the services they provided with engineered alternatives is extremely expensive, and sometimes impossible.
Livelihoods and Subsistence
About 350 million people who live within or near dense forests depend on them for food, fuel, shelter materials, and income. For many indigenous and rural communities, the forest is not a resource to be extracted but an integrated living system that provides daily necessities: protein from game and fish, fruit and tubers, firewood, fiber for weaving, and plants for traditional medicine.
Even outside of subsistence contexts, forests support significant employment. Logging, sawmilling, paper manufacturing, ecotourism, and forest management employ tens of millions of people globally. In countries like Finland, Canada, and Brazil, the forestry sector is a major contributor to the national economy. Community forestry programs, where local populations manage and benefit from nearby forests, have become an increasingly common model for balancing conservation with economic development.
Mental and Physical Health
Spending time in forests produces measurable changes in the body. A large-scale study conducted across 24 forests in Japan found that walking in a forest lowered salivary cortisol (the body’s primary stress hormone) by nearly 16% compared to walking in a city environment. Participants also showed lower blood pressure, a slower pulse rate, and significantly greater activity in the branch of the nervous system responsible for rest and relaxation, with that calming response roughly doubling after a forest walk.
These findings are the basis of “forest bathing,” a practice that originated in Japan in the 1980s and has since spread worldwide. The benefits aren’t limited to formal programs. Urban parks with mature tree cover, greenways, and even small wooded areas near homes have been linked to reduced rates of anxiety and depression in neighborhood-level health studies. Trees in cities also improve air quality by filtering particulate matter and producing oxygen, a practical health benefit for dense urban populations.
Water and Soil Protection
Forests act as natural water infrastructure. Tree canopies intercept rainfall, slowing its descent so it soaks into the ground rather than running off the surface. Forest soils, rich in organic matter and threaded with root channels, function like a sponge, absorbing water during storms and releasing it slowly into streams and aquifers over weeks and months. This is why many of the world’s major cities source their drinking water from forested watersheds. New York City, for instance, invests in protecting Catskill Mountain forests rather than building additional filtration plants, because the forest does the job more cheaply.
When forests are removed from steep terrain, the consequences can be severe. Soil erodes rapidly, silting up rivers and reservoirs. Flash flooding becomes more frequent and more intense. In agricultural regions, windbreak forests planted along field edges reduce wind erosion and protect crops, a use that dates back centuries and remains common across the Great Plains of the United States, sub-Saharan Africa, and Central Asia.
Recreation and Cultural Value
Forests are among the most visited natural landscapes on Earth. Hiking, camping, hunting, birdwatching, mountain biking, and foraging draw hundreds of millions of visitors to forests each year. National parks and protected forest reserves generate significant tourism revenue, particularly in countries with iconic forest landscapes like Costa Rica, Norway, and the United States.
Beyond economics, forests hold deep cultural and spiritual significance for communities around the world. Sacred groves exist in traditions across West Africa, India, Japan, and Europe. Many indigenous land-management practices, including controlled burning and selective harvesting, have shaped forest composition over thousands of years. These cultural relationships are increasingly recognized in conservation policy, as forests managed by indigenous communities often show lower rates of deforestation than surrounding areas.