Growing evidence suggests that deforestation will have a significant impact on the global hydrological cycle (Pielke et al. 2002) and the carbon cycle. Although the latter is the focus of most international policy concern, the former also provides a rationale for remedial action to curb deforestation and promote the conservation of the world's tropical forests. The future security of the world's forests rests on accounting for the immense climatic and hydrological value of tropical forests in global markets, rather than on simple carbon arithmetic.

According to the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment, ecosystem services are the “benefits that people obtain from ecosystems”. Forests are like giant utilities providing ecosystem services to the world that we all benefit from but we don’t pay for. Apart from carbon storage and sequestration, they include water storage, rainfall generation, climate buffering, biodiversity, soil stabilisation and more.

Forests are cleared due in part to poverty, but increasingly due to the demands for land to produce commodities like beef, soy and palm oil. Globally, deforestation results in the annual loss of rainforest biodiversity and ecosystem services worth as much as the London stock exchange. Is this loss greater than the value of the alternative uses of the land?

This GCP report assesses the latest information on the value of rainforest biodiversity and ecosystem services and shows that in most cases rainforests are worth more alive than dead.

Including a case study of the Democratic Republic of Congo

You can download the report in full, or follow the link below to read the executive summary.

From March to August 2005 Markus Seibel, student of Geography at Humboldt-University of Berlin carried out his master thesis, an evaluation of canopy tourism in Costa Rica. This thesis was written with the support of the Global Canopy Programme GCP, which considers it a pilot study for an evaluation of the global value of canopy tourism. This document is a summary of the study.

You can download the report in full, or follow the link below to read the executive summary.

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The Ouro Preto Declaration: Brazilian Forest Canopies: Biodiversity and Climate Change (July 2004)
You can download the declaration formatted in full, or follow the link below to read the text only version.

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Europe’s Forests under Global Change: Biodiversity, Functions and Future Trajectories (November 2002)
EOI Submitted by European Canopy Network (EUCAN)