Forest ecosystems are a critical component of the world’s biodiversity as many forests are more biodiverse than other ecosystems.Forests cover 31 percent of the global land area. Approximately half the forest area is relatively intact, and more than one-third is primary forest (i.e. naturally regenerated forests of native species, where there are no visible indications of human activities and the ecological processes are not significantly disturbed).The total forest area is 4.06 billion hectares, or approximately 5 000m2 (or 50 x 100m) per person, but forests are not equally distributed around the globe.More than half of the world’s forests are found in only five countries (the Russian Federation, Brazil, Canada, the United States of America and China) and two-thirds (66 percent) of forests are found in ten countries.
The Global Assessment Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services is a report by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, on the global state of biodiversity. A summary for policymakers was released on 6 May 2019.[2] The report states that, due to human impact on the environment in the past half-century, the Earth's biodiversity has suffered a catastrophic decline unprecedented in human history.[3] An estimated 82 percent of wild mammal biomass has been lost, while 40 percent of amphibians, almost a third of reef-building corals, more than a third of marine mammals, and 10 percent of all insects are threatened with extinction.There are just over three trillion trees on Earth, according to a new assessment. This is according to a study published in the journal Nature. This means that there are roughly 422 trees for every person on earth.Nearly 50% of the world’s forests are found in the 5 biggest countries; Russia, Canada, Brazil, the USA, and China, while almost two-thirds of this stems from ten countries, including; The Democratic Republic of Congo, Indonesia, Australia, Peru, and India.
Global wildlife populations have decreased by 68% since 1970 as a result of human activity, particularly overconsumption, population growth and intensive farming, according to a 2020 World Wildlife Fund's Living Planet Report and the Zoological Society of London's Living Planet Index measure, which is further evidence that humans have unleashed a sixth mass extinction event. According to CITES, it has been estimated that annually the international wildlife trade amounts to billions of dollars and it affects hundreds of millions of animal and plant specimen.Animals living in the wild experience many harms due to causes which are either completely or partially natural, such as starvation, dehydration, parasitism, predation, disease, injury and extreme weather conditions.In recent years, a number of academics have argued that we should work towards alleviating these forms of suffering, while others have argued that wild animals are best left alone or that attempts to relieve suffering are unfeasible
The Report finds that around 1 million animal and plant species are now threatened with extinction, many within decades, more than ever before in human history. The average abundance of native species in most major land-based habitats has fallen by at least 20%, mostly since 1900.There are now 41,415 species on the IUCN Red List, and 16,306 of them are endangered species threatened with extinction. This is up from 16,118 last yearExtinctions have been a natural part of our planet's evolutionary history. More than 99% of the four billion species that have evolved on Earth are now gone. At least 900 species have gone extinct in the last five centuries. Only a small percentage of species have been evaluated for their extinction risk.