The Forest Stripes show how the population abundance of species that rely on forests have declined between 1970 and 2018. There is one stripe per year and, over that time, the population sizes of forest-dependant animals have declined average by 79%. The Forest Stripes are a collaboration between WWF, the University of Reading, University of Derby and ZSL, the Zoological Society of London, part of the wider Climate Stripes family.
Swansea University is playing a key role in the latest call to action laying out the critical steps governments must take to save the world’s forests.
The 2030 Global Forest Vision: Priority actions for governments in 2025, led by the global Forest Declaration Assessment, has just been released to provide urgently needed guidance for how governments can accelerate efforts to reverse large-scale forest loss worldwide ahead of the November COP30 climate summit in Brazil.
It provides a vision for what world leaders can do this year to adopt a more responsible approach to managing the world’s forests including:
- Rallying around forest goals with renewed ambition, integrating them into national climate and biodiversity plans and in upcoming conference outcomes;
- Significantly scaling up financial support for forests;
- Securing the land rights and supporting the self-determination of Indigenous and Afro-descendent peoples and local communities;
- Identifying and repurposing subsidies that harm forests and ecosystems, directing them toward a sustainable food systems transformation, a bioeconomy transition, and sustainable forest management;
- Strengthen governance in the land-use sector, including legal frameworks, law enforcement, transparency, and accountability.
Swansea University has provided expert scientific support and knowledge translation to ensure there is crucial evidence to underpin these calls.
One key piece of evidence the new report uses is the Forest Pathways Report, co-authored by Swansea and WWF, which was the world's first blueprint on halting and reversing global deforestation.
Professor Mary Gagen said: “The 2030 Global Forest Vision is a new call to action released by a group of forest-focused civil society and research organizations, like us here at Swansea, which asks governments to work together to halt and reverse global deforestation.
“In 2021, when the UK hosted the COP26 meeting in Glasgow, 140 world leaders made a pledge to stop forest loss by 2030. That was a really proud moment, and it was great that it happened at a UK-hosted COP, but since then global rates of forest loss have done exactly the opposite, increasing each year.”
She explained that in 2023 alone, 6.37 million hectares of forests were lost – the equivalent to 9 million football pitches.
Professor Gagen said: “The Global Forest Vision lays out a set of priority actions and an ask to those world leaders to start delivering, without delay, and accelerate the process of halting deforestation, so we meet that all-important 2030 global goal. This isn’t just an issue for far away, tropical places – the goods we import into the UK are responsible for deforestation overseas as well
“It takes an area of land overseas 40 per cent the size of Wales, to grow the products we import to Wales each year – things like cocoa for chocolate, cow grazing for beef and leather production, palm oil plantations and products like natural rubber. Much of that land will be tropical rain forest.”