The role of forests in combating climate change risks being overlooked by the world’s governments. That’s why a group of scientists say halting deforestation as urgent as reducing emissions.

Razing the world’s forests would release more than 3 trillion tons of carbon dioxide, more than the amount locked in identified global reserves of oil, coal, and gas. By protecting and restoring forests, the world would achieve 18% of the emissions mitigation needed by 2030 to avoid runaway climate change, and it is what the group of 40 scientists from five countries said.

We must protect and maintain healthy forests to avoid dangerous climate change and to ensure the world’s forests continue to provide services critical for the well-being of the planet and ourselves.

Trees and other vegetation currently absorb around a quarter of the CO2 humans are adding to the atmosphere, softening the potential impact of climate change.

While the world won’t lose all of its trees, large tracts of tropical forests, which hold a vast amount of carbon, are still being lost in the Amazon, central Africa, and Indonesia. Warming temperatures are also fueling huge fires in forests in higher latitudes, as witnessed this summer when much of northern Sweden was aflame.

We almost take forests as a given but we lose forest every year, which means we are diminishing them as a carbon sink. Deforestation has been massively reduced in the Amazon, but that hasn’t happened elsewhere. As countries get more peaceful in Africa we could lose more tropical forests, which worries scientists.

The scientists’ statement warns the former strategy, known as bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, is untested and risks wiping out huge areas of rainforest in order to make way for plantation timber for energy.

It breaks our hearts to think we’d lose half our tropical forests for plantations just to save ourselves. It’s horrifying that we’d lose our biodiversity to avert climate change. Losing tropical forests is not somehow cheaper than putting up wind farms in the US or Sahara.

A steep drop in emissions to zero by 2040 would negate the need for “negative emissions” technology that would damage forests’ ability to suck up carbon, maintain local water supplies and weather patterns and provide a home for a riot of birds, mammals, insects, and other creatures.

We will have a hotter, drier world without these forests. There needs to be an international price on carbon to fund the protection of forests. And countries with tropical forests should maintain large chunks of forests to stabilize rainfall for agriculture and keep a predictable regional climate.