What this site does not cover, and why

The rule we are following

Every ActSmall topic operates on a single editorial rule: where the named scientific and operational authorities converge, we display it; where they diverge or are silent, we do not invent a position. For forests that means the IPCC and IPBES (climate and biodiversity science), the FAO Forest Resources Assessment (the canonical global forest inventory), Global Forest Watch and the integrated deforestation alerts dataset (operational change detection), the World Resources Institute's intact-forest-landscapes dataset, and the named national forest agencies. Where they converge we cite them. Where they have not, we say nothing.

Voluntary carbon offsets and REDD+ project ratings

The voluntary carbon market (Verra VCS, Gold Standard, ACR, Climate Action Reserve) and the REDD+ jurisdictional architecture are real, large, and contested. A succession of academic and journalistic investigations (notably the 2023 ProPublica / Die Zeit / Guardian / The New Yorker work on Verra-certified rainforest projects, and the Cames et al. 2016 review of the Clean Development Mechanism) found that a substantial fraction of issued credits did not represent the additional emissions reductions they claimed^[1]. We do not rate specific projects, registries, or credit standards on the map, because (a) the methodologies are revised faster than a static map can track, (b) we are not an offset-rating agency, and (c) the IPCC AR6 chapter on land has explicitly not endorsed a single project-level integrity standard. Where readers want a project rating, we link to the named third-party reviewers (CarbonPlan, Sylvera, BeZero, Calyx Global) rather than producing our own.

FSC versus SFI versus PEFC versus uncertified

The major forest-product certification labels — Forest Stewardship Council (FSC), Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI), Programme for the Endorsement of Forest Certification (PEFC), and various national equivalents — have overlapping but not identical chain-of-custody and forest-management standards, and the differences between them are the subject of long-running debate among ENGOs, industry, and government procurement programmes^[2]. The FAO and ITTO have not endorsed a single label as globally superior. We name the certifications as they exist and link to the official site for each; we do not tell readers "buy FSC, not SFI" because that is not a position the named bodies have converged on, and the regional picture differs across North America, Europe, and the tropics.

"Best biome" framings

"Tropical forests are more important than boreal forests" (and vice versa) is a perennial framing that obscures the actual evidence. The IPCC AR6 working-group I chapter 5 (the global carbon cycle) and IPBES Global Assessment treat tropical, temperate, and boreal forests as different storage and flux systems with different per-hectare carbon densities, biodiversity profiles, and disturbance regimes — not as a ranking^[3]. The Intact Forest Landscapes dataset we display is biome-agnostic by design. We do not rank biomes and we do not produce "X is more important than Y" headlines.

Tree-planting targets and "trillion trees" campaigns

The Bonn Challenge, the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration, the WEF Trillion Trees Initiative, the African Forest Landscape Restoration Initiative (AFR100), and a number of national tree-planting pledges are real and important. Several recent reviews (Nature 2019 Bastin et al. response, Bond et al. 2019, Lewis et al. 2019) have also shown that planting in non-historically-forested biomes (savannas, grasslands, certain peatlands) can be carbon-negative or biodiversity-degrading^[4]. We do not endorse a specific planting target and we do not pre-rate which pledges are credible. We link to the official sites for each initiative and to the published peer-reviewed reviews that critique them.

Bioenergy, palm oil, and other forest-substitution debates

Wood-pellet bioenergy (the Drax-style debate), oil palm (the Indonesian and Malaysian land-use debate), industrial cattle and soy in the Amazon, eucalyptus and pine plantation expansion: these are the largest forest-loss drivers globally, and they are also genuinely contested at the policy level — producer countries and consumer countries publish very different framings. The FAO, World Resources Institute, and CIFOR-ICRAF publish technical analyses we cite. We do not assert national-policy positions for the producer countries.

Where this leaves us

The forest topic covers what the IPCC, IPBES, FAO, WRI, and the national forest agencies have converged on: forest extent and change from the FAO FRA (the global accounting baseline), near-real-time integrated deforestation alerts from Global Forest Watch, intact forest landscapes from the WRI/IFL Mapping Team, and the household-scale actions (reforesting a square metre, supporting verified-restoration projects, choosing certified wood products where they are available) that the named bodies endorse. Where the named authorities are silent or where the question is policy rather than household action, we say so.