Forest landscapes cover a third of Earth’s land area and provide a range of vital goods and services. They are home to much of the world’s biodiversity and remaining undeveloped areas.

However, forests are under threat. The Earth has lost almost half of its historical forest area to competing claims on the land—particularly for agriculture—and to destructive logging. These trends continue at an alarming rate today.

Furthermore, deforestation and land use change are responsible for almost 20% of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions. Solving the climate change crisis, therefore, also depends on improving forest management.

Illegal and/or unsustainable forest management and weak forest governance deprive many people—including some of the world’s poorest—of their fair share of the forest-related benefits, while creating pressure for deforestation and logging of primary forest. Many drivers lie outside of the forest sector, but undiscriminating demand for forest products is also a major cause.

There are opportunities: worldwide, the demand for accountability is growing in the forest sector, while rapidly improving information and communication technologies improve transparency. WRI seeks to take advantage of these opportunities to stimulate and support better forest management.

We do this by harnessing the latest technology and by working in partnership with non-governmental organizations, private companies, government agencies and research institutions in both producer and consumer countries. We seek to ensure that forest management and timber procurement are well-informed—that reliable and accurate information on forest use, condition and threats is publicly available and routinely used in decision making by both the public and private sectors.

Our activities:

• Monitor and map forests—support national efforts to create, review and make public geo-spatial forest information and produce map-based tools for decision making.
• Provide training and technical assistance to governments, corporations, and non-governmental organizations in the production and use of maps and information.
• Build bridges among business, government, and civil society institutions to share information and promote collaborative problem solving.
• Support sustainable procurement of forest products—provide purchasers with reliable, impartial, and easy-to-understand advice.
• Address climate change—support incentive systems for avoided deforestation (e.g. REDD).
• Assess forestry revenue distribution—examine how revenue from forest exploitation is distributed.
• Assess the footprint of the oil and gas industry in the forest landscape—explore the environmental mpacts of the oil and gas industry on forest landscapes.

We work with local partner organizations in four forest-rich regions of the world: The Congo Basin, Southeast Asia, Russia, and the Amazon Basin. We also monitor tree cover change and intact forest landscapes at the global level.