Humanity cuts down forests primarily to make space for fields to grow crops and pastures to raise livestock. By far, the most important driver of the destruction of forests is agriculture.Still today about half of extracted wood globally is used to produce energy, mostly for cooking and heating in poor households that lack alternatives. Burning wood is a major source of energy where there are trees but no modern energy sources available. We need wood for many purposes: as construction material for houses or ships, to turn it into paper, and – most importantly – as a source of energy.There are two big reasons why humans have destroyed forests and continue to do so – the need for land and the need for wood: That means our ancestors destroyed one-third of the former forests – a forest area twice the size of the US was lost. The forested land area declined from 6 to 4 billion hectares. 1 Since then, people in all regions of the world have burned and cut down forests.

At the end of the last great ice age, an estimated 57% of the world’s habitable land was forested. For thousands of years humans have destroyed forests.

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