Global forest land-use change 1990–2005
This report presents the key findings on forest land use and land-use change between 1990 and 2005 from FAO’s 2010 Global Forest Resources Assessment Remote Sensing Survey. It is the first report of its kind to present systematic estimates of global forest land use and change. The ambitious goal of the Remote Sensing Survey was to use remote sensing data to obtain globally consistent estimates of forest area and changes in tree cover and forest land use between 1990 and 2005. Overall, it found that there was a net decrease in global forest area between 1990 and 2005, with the highest net loss in South America. While forest area increased over the assessment period in the boreal, temperate and subtropical climatic domains, it decreased by an average of 6.8 million hectares annually in the tropics. The survey estimated the total area of the world’s forests in 2005 at 3.8 billion hectares, or 30 percent of the global land area.