Message from the Guest Editors:
A forest-based bioeconomy is posited to reduce the environmental impacts of economic growth through improved management that ensures sustainable production and consumption. While forests cover a third of the global land area, they are weakly included in bioeconomy strategies, and non-timber forest products (NTFP) are absent. The plants, fungi and animals that produce NTFP are essential to peoples’ food, medicinal, energy and livelihood security and sovereignty and healthy and resilient forest ecosystems, and as sources of phytochemicals and further products, thus constituting integral parts of any forest-based bioeconomy.

The IUFRO task force “Unlocking the Bioeconomy and Non-Timber Forest Products” is facilitating this Special Issue of the journal Forests. The Special Issue “Non-Timber Forest Products and the Bioeconomy” addresses the myriad of issues affecting efforts to improve the production, management and governance of NTFP to support inclusion in emerging models of forest-based bioeconomies.