Forests are necessary for the survival of billions of people who rely on them, argues a new UN report presented in Rome Monday.
"Food from the forests -- like fruit, nuts, mushrooms, leaves, roots, insects and wild animals -- often contributes a nutritious supplement to rural people and provides a safety net in times of hardship," said Eva Mueller, director of the Food and Agriculture Organization's Forestry Division.
PHOTOS: The Oldest Living Things in the World
Mueller was commenting on the UN's State of the World's Forest report, which argues that it's time to shift conservation efforts from "trees to people."
Forests employ 13.2 million people in the formal forestry sector, the report said. Nearly a third of the world's population requires wood for cooking, and 764 million people use wood as fuel to boil drinking water.
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Mueller estimated forests provide the habitat for about 80 percent of the world's biodiversity and are "home to many pollinator species."
Hat tip: BBC News. Photo: Thinkstock
Rachel Sussman spent a decade working with biologists and traveling the globe to photograph continuously living organisms that are 2,000 years old and older. She traveled to remote locations from Greenland to Antarctica, Africa and Australia for her book
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The Oldest Living Things in the World
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Above, bristlecone pines are the oldest unitary organisms in the world, known to surpass 5,000 years in age. In the 1960s a then-grad student cut down what would have been the oldest known tree in the world while retrieving a lost coring bit. A cross section of that tree was placed in a Nevada casino.
This critically endangered eucalyptus is around 13,000 years old, and one of fewer than five individuals of its kind left on the planet. The species name might hint to heavily at its location, so it has been redacted.
What looks like moss covering rocks is actually a very dense, flowering shrub that happens to be a relative of parsley, living in the extremely high elevations of the Atacama Desert.
This 5,500-year-old moss bank lives right around the corner from where the Shackleton Expedition was marooned 100 years ago on Elephant Island, Antarctica. It was a victory simply being able to locate it. These days it's easier to get to Antarctica from space.
At 100,000 years old, the Posidonia sea grass meadow was first taking root at the same time some of our earliest ancestors were creating the first known “art studio” in South Africa. It lives in the UNESCO-protected waterway between the islands of Ibiza and Formentera.
This 9,950-year-old tree is like a portrait of climate change. The mass of branches near the ground grew the same way for roughly 9,500 years, but the new, spindly trunk in the center is only 50 or so years old, caused by warming at the top of this mountain plateau in Western Sweden.