History

FAO's mandate to assess the world's forest resources stems from its constitution, "The Organization shall collect, analyze, interpret and disseminate information relating to nutrition, food and agriculture. In this Constitution, the term ‘agriculture’ and its derivatives include fisheries, marine products, forestry and primary forestry products" (Article I, Functions of the Organization, paragraph 1).^[2]

The first FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment was published in 1948 and focused mostly on assessing the availability of timber. Since then, FAO has been monitoring the world's forests at five- to ten-year intervals, and has produced various regional and global surveys.^{[3] [4][5]}

Country reporting

FRA is a country-driven process where official national data are reported to FAO by country officers known as national correspondents.^[6] National correspondents are officially nominated by their countries to compile and report information and data on their national forest resources.^[7] FAO trains the national correspondents on how to compile country reports using commonly agreed-upon terms and definitions and a standardized reporting methodology.

For the FRA 2020, FAO developed the FRA Platform, an online reporting platform where national correspondents add statistical data and metadata on their country's forests and their management and use.^[8] The FRA Platform acts as both a reporting platform and a data storage site. It also provides countries that do not have forestry inventory and monitoring systems a tool to consistently interpolate or extrapolate forestry figures.^[9]

Remote sensing

Since 1990, FRA has used remote sensing to complement the information collected through the country reporting process with global and regional analyses of the world's forest resources. With better access to a growing archive of satellite imagery and the availability of new tools to facilitate image processing and interpretation, remote sensing has become an important tool for the assessment of the status and changes in tree cover and land use. FRA uses remote sensing surveys to build country capacities to use remote sensing for forest monitoring as well as to generate independent, robust and consistent estimates of forest area and its changes over time at global, regional and biome levels.^[10]

Land use

Forest area changes

Reporting content

This section may contain an excessive amount of intricate detail that may interest only a particular audience. (April 2023)

The latest FRA^{[as of?]} collected data on over 60 broad variable categories including:

Desk studies

When countries do not nominate national correspondents to prepare country reports, FAO experts write their own reports based on estimated values and statistics and then publish them as desk studies.^[15] To collect data for a desk study, FAO experts rely on previously published country reports as well as on other recently published reports and spatial datasets. In some cases, complementary remote sensing-based analysis is implemented as an additional data source.

Latest assessment

The most recent assessment, FRA 2020, examined the status of, and trends in, more than 60 forest-related variables in 236 countries and territories in the period 1990–2020. The assessment showed that although the rate of deforestation has slowed, the world's forest area continues to decrease.^[16] Key findings include:

• The world has a total forest area of 4.06 billion hectares (ha), which is 31 percent of the total land area.
• The world's forest area is decreasing, but the rate of loss has declined since 1990.
  • Since 1990, the world has lost 178 million ha of forest.
  • The rate of net forest loss decreased substantially over the period 1990–2020 due to a reduction in deforestation in some countries, plus increases in forest area in others through afforestation and the natural expansion of forests.
    • The rate of net forest loss declined from 7.8 million ha per year in the decade 1990–2000 to 5.2 million ha per year in 2000–2010 to 4.7 million ha per year in 2010–2020.
  • Deforestation is the conversion of forest to other land uses, such as agriculture and infrastructure.
    • An estimated 420 million ha of forest has been deforested – converted to other land uses – worldwide since 1990. In the most recent five-year period (2015–2020), the annual rate of deforestation was estimated at 10 million ha, down from 12 million ha in 2010–2015.
• On a regional scale, Africa has the highest annual rate of net forest loss at 3.9 million ha in 2010–2020, followed by South America at 2.6 million ha.
  • While the rate of net forest loss for Africa has increased since 1990, it has declined in South America by about one half between the decades 2000-2010 and 2010–2020.
• On the other hand, Asia had the highest net gain of forest area in 2010–2020 at 1.2 million ha per year, followed by Oceania at 0.4 million ha then Europe^[17] at 0.3 million ha.
  • However, both Asia and Europe reported substantially lower rates of net gain in 2010-2020 than in 2000–2010.
• 93 percent of forest area worldwide is composed of naturally regenerating forest while the remaining 7 percent is planted forest.

The next comprehensive FRA report is due in 2025.

Past assessments

FAO began publishing forestry assessments in 1948. The first four assessments were published as World Forestry Inventories in 1948, 1953, 1958 and 1963. The reports collected data through questionnaires sent to countries.^[18] FRA did not publish any global forestry reports in the 1970s. Instead, FAO conducted regional forest resource assessments that were published in three separate reports.^[19] The three reports focused on Europe, Asia and Africa respectively. Since 1980, the reports have become more technical, relying on country analyses by national correspondents, remote sensing and statistical modeling instead of questionnaires.^[18] Due to evolving methods, definitions and changes in baseline information, assessments are not comparable. As a result, users should always reference the latest assessment to source information.

Millennium Development Goals

The Millennium Development Goals consisted of eight international development goals for 2015. Goal 7 of the MDGs was to “ensure environmental sustainability” and part of Target 7B was to “reduce biodiversity loss” in terms of forests. FRA was responsible for reporting the proportion of land area covered by forest to the MDGs.

Sustainable Development Goals

The Sustainable Development Goals replaced the MDGs in 2015 and are a series of 17 goals to achieve by 2030, to ensure a more sustainable future for all. FRA is responsible for collecting data and reporting on two forest-related SDG indicators. Data submitted to FRA contributes to reporting on Goal 15: Life on Land indicators 15.1.1 forest area as a proportion of total land area and 15.2.1 progress towards sustainable forest management.^[20]

Global Forest Goals

The UN Strategic Plan for Forests 2017 - 2030 features a set of six Global Forest Goals and 26 associated targets to be reached by 2030. One important target is to increase forest area by three percent worldwide by 2030.^[21] The Global Forest Goals Report 2021 drew on quantitative and bio-physical data primarily from FRA 2020.^[22]