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Forest Loss

Map No. 108

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If the net forest loss of all territories between 1990 and 2000 is summed, 31% occurred in South America, and 21% was in Asia Pacific. Worldwide, territories with net forest loss lost 1.33 million km² of forest over this ten year period. Despite this, South America was the region with the largest forested area in the world in 2000. The more forest area there is, the more it is possible to lose.

Japan is unexceptional, having neither forest loss nor forest growth from 1990 to 2000.

The area of Africa covered by forest was reduced by 550 000 km² in the 1990s. This includes the loss of forests that covered 11.4% of Zambian land.

"Indonesia is blessed with some of the most extensive and biologically diverse tropical forests in the world. But the tragedy is that Indonesia has one of the highest rates of tropical forest loss in the world." E.G. Togu Manurung, 2006

Territory size shows the proportion of worldwide net forest loss that occurred there between 1990 and 2000.

• Open PDF poster, designed for printing. You need Acrobat Reader.
• View labelled territory map or population map for comparison
• Data files: Excel (large with map), Excel (small no map), Opendoc format (see notes)
• Technical notes for this data.
• High Resolution image (see copyright conditions)
• All of the data we use is estimated; see data page