China Is Bright Spot in Dark Report on the World's Diminishing Forests
By ANDREW C. REVKIN
Published: November 15, 2005
Widespread tree planting in China has slowed the rate at which the earth's forested area is dwindling, but the clearing of tropical forests, much of it in areas never previously cut, continues to grow, according to a new United Nations report.
Change in Forest Area
Global Forest Watch
The study was published yesterday by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, based in Rome, and is online at fao.org/forestry.
"While good progress is being made in many places, unfortunately forest resources are still being lost or degraded at an alarmingly high rate," said Hosny El-Lakany, assistant director-general of forestry for the food and agriculture agency.
The slowing rate of forest loss is encouraging, some forest experts say, but biologists contend that most acreage gained by plantation forestry contains a fraction of the plant and animal diversity destroyed with virgin forests. Forest cover has generally been expanding in North America, Europe and China and diminishing in the tropics.
The report said that worldwide just over 50,000 square miles of forest - an area a bit smaller than New York State - had been cleared or logged annually since 2000. Nearly half of that annual loss affected tracts with no evidence of previous significant human use, the report said.
In the report, which compared forest trends over the last five years with those through the 1990's, South America passed Africa in net annual loss of forests (the difference between areas added as plantations and lost through cutting or burning).
Much recent clearing in South America has occurred in the southern Amazon basin, where jungle is rapidly being converted to pasture and farmland, especially soybean fields, the report said.
Asia has seen an extraordinary turnaround in a decade: it lost about 3,000 square miles of forest a year in the 90's but gained nearly 4,000 annually since 2000, said Mette Loyche Wilkie of the F.A.O. But almost all of that change has occurred because of China's new forest policy, she said. Tropical forests elsewhere in Asia are still being cleared at a rising pace, the report said.
Several independent forest experts said the study was a valuable rough estimate of global trends, but cautioned that it was generated using data provided by countries with widely varying track records in monitoring deforestation.
"The F.A.O. is doing the best it can given what the governments are providing," said Mila Alvarez, who tracks forest trends for World Resources Institute and Global Forest Watch (globalforestwatch.org). She said they and other groups were preparing to develop a way to use satellite imagery to analyze forest changes and to verify government estimates.