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Of: TT
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Photo: Leo Correa / AP / TT
Devastated land in Brazil. Stock Photography.
Almost 100 million hectares, or more than twice the area of Sweden.
Many forests have disappeared on earth since 2000. But a slight decline has been noted in the last decade.
At the turn of the millennium, there were around 4.2 billion hectares of forests in the world, corresponding to 31.9 percent of the entire land area.
That share has dropped to 31.2 percent 20 years later, new figures from the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) show.
Those most affected are sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, two regions where deforestation has increased in recent years. The main reason is that farmers are cutting down the forest for agricultural and grazing land.
The Amazon and other parts of South and Central America are also heavily employed, but the last ten years have seen a slight slowdown. In South America, devastation has decreased from 5 million hectares per year between 2000 and 2010, to just over 2.5 million hectares since then. In Brazil, the proportion of forests has been reduced by only one percent since 2015.
In some parts of the world, the trend has been completely reversed, and several countries are showing an increase in the distribution of forests, according to FAO, partly as a result of political decisions. This applies to several countries in Europe, including China and Australia. In both the United States and Canada, the numbers are the same as five years ago.
Russia is the country with the most forests in the world, its 815 million hectares are 20.1 percent of all the world’s forests.
Sweden is one of the countries where the area is increasing, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature WWF there are about 28 million hectares of forest land.
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