International Day of Forests
<p>The idea of giving forests a day of their own is older than the day itself. As far back as November 1971, at the sixteenth session of the Conference of the Food and Agriculture Organization, delegates put forward a proposal for a World Forestry Day to fall on 21 March, the equinox. For four decades that idea drifted along in various forms while the science of what forests actually do for the planet sharpened considerably. Then, on 21 December 2012, the United Nations General Assembly adopted resolution 67/200 and declared 21 March the International Day of Forests, first observed the following year, in 2013.</p>
<p>The date was not chosen at random. The 21st of March is the equinox, spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern, a moment of seasonal turning that suits a celebration of the renewal and global reach of forests. Every year the day raises awareness of all types of forests, and of the trees that grow outside them, under a theme selected by the Collaborative Partnership on Forests.</p>
<h2 id="from-a-1971-proposal-to-a-2012-resolution">From a 1971 proposal to a 2012 resolution</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>The long gestation is part of the story. The original 1971 proposal for a World Forestry Day reflected a mid-century, largely utilitarian concern with managing timber as a resource. What changed over the following decades was the understanding of forests as climate infrastructure, as carbon stores and water regulators rather than just sources of wood.</p>
<p>A crucial step on the way was the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development held in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, the so-called Earth Summit, which placed sustainable forest management firmly on the international agenda. Momentum built further between 2007 and 2012, when the Center for International Forestry Research, working with other members of the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, convened a series of six Forest Days. The General Assembly also named 2011 the International Year of Forests, under the theme “Forests for People”. That year’s launch at UN Headquarters in New York drew the Kenyan environmentalist and Nobel laureate Wangari Maathai, founder of the Green Belt Movement, whose campaigners had planted tens of millions of trees across Kenya; she died later in 2011, and the fifth Forest Day was dedicated to her memory. The permanent International Day of Forests, declared the next year, was in many ways the culmination of all this groundwork.</p>
<h2 id="why-forests-matter">Why forests matter</h2>
<p>Forests are sometimes called the lungs of the planet, and while the metaphor is imperfect, the underlying point is sound. By drawing carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and locking it away in wood and soil, forests act as one of the largest natural brakes on climate change available to humanity. When forests are cleared or degraded, that stored carbon is released, turning a brake into an accelerator. The arithmetic is unforgiving, and it is the single sharpest reason the day exists.</p>
<p>Their value runs well beyond carbon, though. Forests regulate the water cycle, stabilise soils against erosion, and shelter an enormous share of the world’s land-living plants and animals. Vast numbers of people depend on them directly for food, fuel, medicine, building material and income, and many Indigenous and local communities hold cultural and spiritual ties to wooded landscapes that have sustained them across countless generations. Sustainable forest management tries to honour those ties, keeping forests both productive for people and healthy in themselves. Protecting forests, in other words, is not only an environmental question but one of justice and human wellbeing, which is why the link between healthy ecosystems and contentment, central to observances such as the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-happiness/">International Day of Happiness</a>, runs quietly through the day’s themes.</p>
<h2 id="how-it-is-observed">How it is observed</h2><div class="ad-unit ad-in-article" aria-label="Advertisement">
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<p>Tree planting has become the day’s signature act. Schools, environmental organisations and ordinary communities mark 21 March by adding saplings to local woodlands and green spaces, and the gesture is deliberately hands-on; there is something about putting a young tree into the ground that fixes the abstraction of “forest conservation” into a concrete, memorable act.</p>
<p>Around that core, the day fills with educational programmes, photography and art competitions, guided walks, and conferences hosted by governments and international bodies. A good deal of the activity is aimed at the young, on the sensible reasoning that the people who will inherit the consequences of today’s forestry decisions should be drawn into caring about them early. The natural symbol of the day is, fittingly, the tree itself, standing for growth, resilience and the interdependence of living things.</p>
<h2 id="forests-of-every-kind">Forests of every kind</h2>
<p>The word “forest” hides an extraordinary range. The Amazon basin in South America holds the largest tropical rainforest on Earth, a single connected system so vast it generates much of its own rainfall and is sometimes described, only half in jest, as a continent-scale weather machine. Far to the north, the boreal forest, the taiga, sweeps in an almost unbroken green band across Canada, Scandinavia and Russia, storing huge quantities of carbon in cold, slow-rotting soils. Between these extremes lie the temperate woodlands of Europe and East Asia, the dry forests of the African savanna, and the mangroves that fringe tropical coastlines and shield them from storm surges.</p>
<p>Each of these faces different threats and calls for different responses, which is part of why the day’s theme rotates. Clearing for cattle ranching and soya drives loss in the Amazon; logging and fire shape the boreal zone; in much of the tropics, smallholder farming and fuelwood collection chip away at the canopy. A single global day cannot prescribe a single global remedy, and the better events on 21 March acknowledge as much, tailoring their message to the forests on their own doorstep rather than to forests in the abstract.</p>
<p>The restoration side of the story is just as varied. China has spent decades on enormous afforestation schemes, including a vast shelterbelt of planted trees intended to hold back the spread of desert across its northern provinces. Costa Rica reversed one of the highest deforestation rates in the world in the late twentieth century and roughly doubled its forest cover by paying landowners for the environmental services their trees provide. Ethiopia has staged single-day mass tree-planting drives involving millions of citizens. These efforts are uneven in their long-term success, since a planted sapling is not the same as a mature ecosystem, but they show that the loss recorded year after year is not inevitable, and that policy and labour can push the trend the other way.</p>
<h2 id="forests-climate-and-a-thinning-canopy">Forests, climate and a thinning canopy</h2>
<p>The annual themes, rotated by the Collaborative Partnership on Forests, keep returning to the relationship between forests and human survival, exploring forests and water, forests and energy, forest restoration, and forests and health in successive years. The recurring worry beneath them all is deforestation. Although the global rate of forest loss has slowed in recent years, falling from around twelve million hectares a year in the first half of the 2010s to roughly ten million in the second, the world is still losing forest faster than it is gaining it.</p>
<p>Forest protection is woven explicitly into the fifteenth Sustainable Development Goal, “Life on Land”, adopted in 2015, which commits the world to halting deforestation and restoring degraded landscapes. Seen from orbit, the planet’s belt of green is one of the most striking features of an inhabited world, a perspective that observances such as the <a href="/specialdate/international-day-of-human-space-flight/">International Day of Human Space Flight</a> helped make familiar; that view from above has done a surprising amount to make people grasp how thin and precious the living canopy really is.</p>
<h2 id="fun-facts">Fun facts</h2>
<ul>
<li>The date of the day, 21 March, was deliberately fixed on the equinox so that it falls in spring in the Northern Hemisphere and autumn in the Southern, symbolically tying a single global observance to the turning of the seasons in both halves of the world.</li>
<li>The push for a forestry day goes back to a 1971 proposal at the Food and Agriculture Organization, meaning the idea waited more than forty years before the United Nations gave it official status in 2012.</li>
<li>The 2011 International Year of Forests was launched alongside Wangari Maathai, the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize, whose Green Belt Movement had planted tens of millions of trees in Kenya before her death later that same year.</li>
<li>Trees outside conventional forests, the ones in hedgerows, on farms and along city streets, are explicitly included in the day’s remit, a recognition that the world’s tree cover is not confined to the great forests alone.</li>
</ul>
<h2 id="a-closing-reflection">A closing reflection</h2>
<p>There is a strange mismatch at the heart of how we treat forests: a single mature tree can take a human lifetime or more to grow, yet can be felled in an afternoon, and a forest that took millennia to assemble can be cleared in a season. The day set on the equinox is, among other things, an argument about timescales, a nudge to think in the slow tempo at which forests actually live rather than the fast one at which they are usually lost. Plant a sapling on 21 March and you are unlikely to sit in its shade; that, quietly, is the point.</p>
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