Protecting forests in faraway places is hard. It's all the more difficult when we only count the value of trees by cutting them down. Of course the world needs wood – but what if forests were actually more valuable when the trees are left standing?

This may seem counter-intuitive, but the numbers are quite intriguing.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO), if we add up the global production and processing of timber and timber products, we find that forests contribute some US$400bn to the world economy. This is a huge sum, to be sure, but compare it to another figure from the international initiative on the economics of ecosystems and biodiversity (TEEB): according to their recent calculations, the costs to the economy associated with greenhouse gas emissions, loss of natural resources, loss of nature-based services such as carbon storage, climate change and pollution-related impacts on human health amount to a staggering US$4.7tn every year.  

Admittedly, the numbers aren't directly comparable and I'm not suggesting that's the cost of not protecting forests, but forests do have an important impact on these environmental challenges. Healthy forests are highly effective at storing greenhouse gases, recycling nutrients, and cleaning the air we breathe and the water we drink. They're a source of food and material (not just timber), and are home to indigenous and local communities whose traditional knowledge can teach us a great deal about how to live in harmony with nature.  Forests are also home to millions of species, including some of the most endangered and emblematic ones. Taken together, this represents an immense value that surely exceeds the sum of the wood a forest contains, but that is simply not accounted for in decisions about how forests are used.

The fact that we lack a proper mechanism to determine the real value of the world's forests means that we never really see the whole forest, only the trees.  As a result, we keep cutting down trees, but we leave the big bill for future generations, who will pay the full price of the irreversible degradation of forest ecosystems.

To get out of this conundrum, we can't just leave it to the market. As Pavan Sukhdev, a former banker who led the TEEB study, points out, until policymakers recognise and reward the value delivered to society by the natural environment, we will witness a further significant decline of the services we currently get from nature for free. These values need to be integrated into business and policy decision-making at all levels.

This objective is now an integral part of the European Union's environmental policy and is in line with the international commitment made in 2010 under the Convention on Biological Diversity to ensure that by 2020 at the latest, the values of biodiversity have been integrated into government strategies and planning processes and are being incorporated into national accounting, as appropriate, and reporting systems.

It's high time we all started seeing the forest behind the trees.