Maintaining the integrity of the world’s forests and other ecosystems plays an important role in biodiversity conservation. More than a third (36 per cent) of the world’s forests remain largely undisturbed by human activity. Yet these primary forests were lost at a rate of about million hectares a year between 2000 and 2005, because of selective logging and other human interventions. Over this same period, forest plantations increased by about 2.8 million hectares a year, mainly due to large-scale tree-planting schemes in China. Forest plantations represent less than per cent of the world’s total forest area.