Today is Monday, February 19, 2024.
Amazon tropical forest, lung of the World? And major carbon sink? But what about other types of forests such as boreal? Not to mention mangroves, topic from our post from last Thursday.
Draw your own conclusions after reading our analysis below about a great new infographic released by Visual Capitalist, with 2021 data sourced from the World Bank.
% of total World forest area:
20,1% Russian Federation (one-fifth of the world’s entire forested area!)
12,3% Brazil
8,6% Canada
7,7% United States
5,5% China
These countries together represent, therefore, close to 55% of of the world’s forests, about 40,449,474.7 km2.
Considering that the Amazon rainforest spreads over Brazil and eight other countries, if it were a country, it would reach about 16,4%. As such, still behind the boreal forests with colder temperatures at the Russian Federation, made up of deciduous and coniferous tree species including larch, pine, spruce, and oak.
The article goes one indicating that "in countries like Bahrain and Kuwait, areas of extreme aridity, where forests would not occur naturally, human-planted forests account for all forest cover. But even across large parts of Europe, planted forests vastly outnumber primary and naturally-regenerated ones, indicating how much deforestation occurred on the continent in the last three centuries, which is now being steadily reversed. In China, which increased its forest cover by the size of Norway in the last three decades, nearly 40% of the total forested area is planted".
We already reported huge efforts in arid regions, not only in term of planting billions of trees (e.g. Saudi Green Initiative) but also seeding clouds for rain, like in United Arab Emirates or even China.
Click at the image below for the full article at Visual Capitalist, by Pallavi Rao and Sam Parker. By the way, the image indicates some more interesting information, such as the concentration of eucalyptus trees in Australia, a tree with "extremely flammable barks", and the palm oil indutry issue in Indonesia.
About the source of information at the World Bank, click here. You will be able to see trends of forest coverag per country and grouped. As an example, 67% is located in middle income countries, 7% in low income and 26% in high income countries. Quite a challenge in terms of inequality, specially considering the authors information that the Earth’s forest cover has fallen by 20 million km2 since the last ice age, and that half of the loss occurred since the year 1900 due to expanding agriculture and industrialization.
You may also like to refer to these other posts, one of them also based on another article from Visual Capitalist:
Last but not least, this week we will post about how you can access public information about both carbon credit projects and largest emitter. Stay tuned and register.
