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The indicator provides a measure of the relative extent of forest in a country.

Forest area as a proportion of the total land area

Forest Department

Forest Department

Annual

Percentage (%)

N/A

According to the FAO definitions, Forest is defined as: “land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10 per cent, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ. It does not include land that is predominantly under agricultural or urban land use”. More specifically:

• Forest is determined both by the presence of trees and the absence of other predominant land uses. The trees should be able to reach a minimum height of 5 meters.
•  It includes areas with young trees that have not yet reached but which are expected to reach a canopy cover of at least 10 per cent and tree height of 5 meters or more. It also includes areas that are temporarily unstocked due to clear-cutting as part of a forest management practice or natural disasters, and which are expected to be regenerated within 5 years. Local conditions may, in exceptional cases, justify that a longer time frame is used.
• It includes forest roads, firebreaks and other small open areas; forest in national parks, nature reserves and other protected areas such as those of specific environmental, scientific, historical, cultural or spiritual interest.
• It includes windbreaks, shelterbelts and corridors of trees with an area of more than 0.5 hectares and width of more than 20 meters.
•  It includes abandoned shifting cultivation land with the regeneration of trees that have, or are expected to reach, a canopy cover of at least 10 per cent and tree height of at least 5 meters.
•  It includes areas with mangroves in tidal zones, regardless whether this area is classified as land area or not.
• It includes rubberwood, cork oak and Christmas tree plantations.
•  It includes areas with bamboo and palms provided that land use, height and canopy cover criteria are met.
•  It excludes tree stands in agricultural production systems, such as fruit tree plantations, oil palm plantations, olive orchards and agroforestry systems when crops are grown under tree cover.

 Total land area is the total surface area of a country less the area covered by inland waters, like major rivers and lakes.

No further disaggregation of this indicator

Forest area (reference year) / Land area (base period) * 100

Forest area as a percentage of the total land area may be used as a rough proxy for the extent to which the forests in a country are being conserved or restored, but it is only partly a measure for the extent to which they are sustainably managed.

•  Access to remote sensing imagery has improved in recent years, but remote sensing techniques have limitations. In particular, there are limitations to assess land use (remote sensing primarily assesses land cover), and some slow changes such as forest regrowth cannot easily be observed with remote sensing techniques and require long time periods in order to detect.
• Forest area with low canopy cover density (e.g. 10-30%) are difficult to detect with remote sensing techniques.

The metadata above was gathered from the United Nation Statistics Division and extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.