Policy brief: The irreplaceability of tropical primary forests

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The economic values of primary tropical forests are global significant. Avoiding their loss and degradation is critical to meeting global climate, biodiversity, and social development goals.

Rainforest canopy

Primary tropical forests provide a range of highly valuable ecosystem services that are of global significance for climate change mitigation and adaptation and biodiversity conservation. Evolutionary processes over millennia have resulted in a level of complexity and stability that makes these forests irreplaceable and investing in their protection is critical to addressing humanity’s gravest challenges. Primary tropical forests maintain a very high level of ecosystem integrity and, as a result, generate superior ecosystem services, particularly, for example, the significant quantity of carbon stored in their biomass and soil.

This working paper describes the importance and economic value of these ecosystem services, making the argument that primary tropical forests are irreplaceable.

 

Article authors

Andrew Buckwell

Andrew Buckwell

Andrew is a Research Fellow at Griffith Business School with experience as an applied environmental economist focussed on micro-economic valuation and community preferences for natural resource use.
Dr Brendan Mackey

Brendan Mackey

Project Director and Director of the Griffith Climate Action Beacon at Griffith University, contributing to community planning and engagement in forest projects.
Cyril Kormos

Cyril Kormos

Cyril is Founder and Executive Director of Wild Heritage, a project of Earth Island Institute. He also serves as IUCN-WCPA Vice-Chair for World Heritage, is a member of IUCN’s World Heritage Panel and chairs the IUCN-WCPA World Heritage Network.
Virginia Young

Virginia Young

Virginia is a Director of the International Forests and Climate Programme for the Australian Rainforest Conservation Society (ARCS) working in the international policy arena on primary forests as part of a global collaborative research programme funded through Griffith University.