The Earth was once a forested planet, with vast expanses of tropical, temperate, and boreal forests enveloping almost half the Earth’s surface.
By the late 1990′s, half of the forests that once covered the Earth – almost 3 billion hectares – had already been lost. Another 16 million hectares are being destroyed every year. That’s almost 44,000 hectares a day. The World Resource Institute (WRI), which published these findings in a 1997 report, suggests that these annual estimates are actually conservative figures, and the real numbers are likely to be higher.
The only remaining forests of any significant size and health are in Canada, the Amazon, and Russia. Canada’s boreal forests constitute 25% of the planet’s remaining original forests, and collectively compose the second largest expanse of intact forest left on Earth
Original Forests 8000 years ago (click to view larger image):
Frontier Forests today:
Source: World Resources Institute, 1997
