Forests, trees and green spaces provide multiple products and services that contribute to human health and wellbeing, including nutritious food, medicines, and non-wood forest products. They also support climate change mitigation and adaptation, moderate micro-climate, filter air pollutants, reduce noise exposure, enrich environmental microbiota, and offer areas for recreation, stress reduction, socialisation, and tourism, all of which can contribute to better physical, mental, and social health and wellbeing.

At the same time, poor forest management practices can result in negative outcomes from the interlinkages between forests, trees, and humans. These are, for example, the emergence of zoonotic and vector-borne diseases such as coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), and malaria, or when forest fires threaten people’s health and wellbeing. Forest loss and degradation cause additional negative impacts on human health through the loss of the aforementioned ecosystem services crucial to human wellbeing. Ten million ha of forests were lost each year between 2015 and 2020 globally, including 2.24 million ha in Asia1 . Global factors such as climate change, biodiversity loss, and poorly planned urbanisation also result in adverse effects on human health through air pollution, noise, and increased extreme weather events such as heatwaves, floods, and droughts, exacerbating existing public health threats.