As the United Nations Decade on Biodiversity
2011–2020 comes to a close and countries
prepare to adopt a post-2020 global biodiversity
framework, this edition of The State of the
World’s Forests (SOFO) takes the opportunity to
examine the contributions of forests, and of the
people who use and manage them, to the
conservation and sustainable use of
biodiversity. It is intended to complement The
State of the World’s Biodiversity for Food and
Agriculture, released by the Food and
Agriculture Organization of the United Nations
(FAO) in February 2019; the Global Assessment
Report on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services of
the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform
on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES),
the draft of which was released in 2019 and the
Global Biodiversity Outlook 5 of the Convention
on Biological Diversity (CBD), released in 2020.
