Key Facts on Forest Issues

• Three-quarters of the world's people rely on wood as their main source of energy.
  
  
• In Ethiopia, between 100,000 and 200,000 hectares of forest are cut down every year. Still, at least 200 million people lack enough wood to cook their food properly.
  
  
• Destruction of forests creates numerous environmental catastrophes, including altering local rainfall patterns, accelerating soil erosion, causing the flooding of rivers, and threatening millions of species of plants, animals and insects with extinction.
  
  
• Tropical forests cover 23 per cent of the Earth's land surface, but they are disappearing at a rate of 4.6 million hectares a year. Asia leads losses with 2.2 million hectares a year, Latin America and the Caribbean together lose 1.9 million and Africa loses 470,000 hectares of rain forest every year.
  
  
• About 6.1 million hectares of moist deciduous forest disappear every year, of which the largest regional share is in Latin America and the Caribbean, with 3.2 million hectares lost.
  
  
• More than 1.8 million hectares of dry deciduous forest disappear every year, 40 per cent of which is lost in the Sudan, Paraguay, Brazil and India.
  
  
• Annual losses of very dry forest total some 341,000 hectares. The Sudan loses 81,000 hectares of this type of forest every year, followed closely by Botswana, with 58,000 hectares
  
  
• Global annual deforestation for desert forest stands at an estimated 82,000 hectares, 60 per cent of which is lost in Mexico and Pakistan.
  
  
• Hills and mountains lose about 2.5 million hectares of forest annually, 640,000 of which are lost in Brazil, 370,000 in Mexico, and 150,000 hectares in Indonesia.
  
  

All photos, text and illustrations Copyright ©1996 The United Nations Environment Programme.