Environment, forests and climate change

The complex interlinkages between poverty, development and the environment are well known: environmental degradation often affects the poor disproportionately, but poverty can also be a driver of unsustainable natural resource use and environmental decline. These impacts are amplified through the effect of climate change; and all impacts play out differently across differences in gender, social class and ethnicity. Forests, in particular, play an important role in the global ecosystem, intersecting with issues across multiple dimensions from livelihoods and land use through to forest management and monitoring, global trade and the management of global carbon emissions.