Over the years, there’s been all sorts of rhetoric about our disappearing forests. You’ve heard it all before. We’re losing some imaginably big number of “football fields” worth of forest per day.
For some reason, football fields are a popular unit of measure of forest area among mainstream media. So, is it all true? Are we in serious trouble? Let’s have a look at the facts.
The world has about 4 billion hectares of forest. A hectare, to give a bit of perspective, is a square that is 100 metres by 100 metres.
Roughly two football fields side by side, for those of you want to continue the football field thing. So the world has about 8 billion football fields worth of forest. This amounts to about 30% of the land area of the earth, and it doesn’t even account for the other 1.4 billion hectares of “other wooded land” that the United Nations counts. Thirty-six percent of the forest is pristine, untouched by human hands. Around 53% is natural forest, but with evidence of human activity, such as selective logging. The remainder is forest that have been planted by humans, for a variety of reasons, the main being tree plantations for the forestry industry.
So, now that we know a little about the scope of the forest, how are we doing in terms of conserving it? The world is losing 7.3 million hectares of forest each year. For you football minded, that works out to 40,000 football fields per day. Pretty serious. However, to put it in another perspective, this amounts to less than 0.2% of total forest area lost per year. It’s actually a pretty good improvement from the 1990′s, when we were losing around 9 million hectares of forest per year. Let’s take a more specific look.
Despite the bald-faced, clear-cut mountainsides I see whenever I drive into the Canadian interior, North America is actually doing okay.
North America loses only around 350,000 hectares of forest per year.
Europe does much better, actually gaining about a million hectares of forest per year, mostly from forests naturally taking over abandoned farmland. Asia, likewise is gaining about a million hectares of forest per year, because of major reforestation projects in China.
The main culprits of the loss in forest area are South America and Africa, both of which lose more than 3 million hectares of forest every year. Most of this loss is from farmers who are ever searching for land to turn to agriculture. And where they can’t find the land, they must create it. Even in these places though, the United Nations believes that it is over-estimating the forest lost. Since soil in tropical rain forest tends not to be fertile, it’s often only a matter of a few years before the farmers have exhausted the land and move on. At that point, the forest reclaims the abandoned farmland, but these gains are often not reported.
So, are we doing good, or are we on the edge of disaster? Obviously not that good, as the 40,000 football fields a day loss in forest area is hard to swallow. But at 0.2% of total forest coverage a year being lost, we do have some time to turn it around before the damage is irreversible.
