The state of the world’s forests

The UN body Food & Agriculture Organisation, estimates that the world’s forests covered 4.03 billion hectares in 2010. Although the world as a whole continues to lose forests, the annual rate of deforestation in the past decade has fallen to 5.2m hectares, compared with 8.3m hectares a year between 1990 and 2000. Some large countries, including China and India, increased their forest cover between 2000 and 2010. China’s increased at an average annual rate of 1.6 percent, while India’s went up by 0.5 percent a year. Norway and Sweden have also added forests over the past decade. With forests covering nearly 70 percent of its area in 2010, Sweden is one of the world’s most sylvan countries. Nigeria, by contrast, has been chopping its forests down at a rate of 3.7 percent a year. By last year only one-tenth of its land remained forested.