While this gives us a ray of hope amidst global despair generated by large-scale denudation of forests, there is little time to gloat. The study, led by Yale scientists from 15 countries, found the highest densities of trees are in the boreal forests in the sub-arctic regions of Russia, Scandinavia, and North America. But the largest forest areas are in the tropics, which are home to about 43 per cent of the world’s trees. There deforestation, land-use change, and forest management are responsible for a gross loss of over 15 billion trees each year. Another recent study, published in Geophysical Research Letters, corroborates the conclusions of the Yale study. According to it, the rate of forest loss across much of the tropics increased by 62 per cent in the first decade of the millennium compared to the 1990s.

It is time that governments, scientists, environmentalists and national and international agencies pooled their resources by using the study data to reverse the process of deforestation. Yale scientists have given us data to help improve the modeling of many large-scale systems, from carbon cycling and climate change models to the distribution of animal and plant species. Resource managers across the world should weigh up economic benefits that forests provide in terms of water purification, soil conservation and other functions against those of harvesting or clearing trees for farmlands.