Last update: 20/05/2004

National and international forest conditions

Deforestation has many connected factors. Among these are poverty; population increase and economic growth in developing countries; urbanization and often uncontrolled tourism development; the need to use land for agriculture and the replacement of natural or semi-natural forests with new forest plantations for the production of timber in relatively brief cycles.
But undoubtedly, deforestation at global level is mainly caused by the collection of timber from the tropical forests. Indeed, as reported by the World Resources Institute (WRI), industrial deforestation (one-off cutting) is responsible for one third of global deforestation and is the main threat to 72% of the so-called frontier forests, those that are still intact.
The problem’s dimensions are not officially known, but the OECD  estimates that one tenth of the international timber trade is fed by illegal cuttings for a value of at least 150 billion dollars/year.
FAO estimates agree and report an average annual deforestation rate of 0.8% (FAO, 2000). The same World Bank states that “the diffusion of illegal low-cost timber makes the improvement of forest management practices unfeasible” and that “countries with tropical forests have continued to cut on a large scale, often with illegal and unsustainable ways”.
In many countries, illegal cutting is equivalent to the legal one while in others, illegality is much more widespread than legal conditions.  In some areas, the percentage of illegality reaches and exceeds half of the cuttings and this also takes place in the last existing primary forests. These are in Africa, in the Congo basin, in Asia and in the Amazon Forest.
This theme has been discussed in different international seats, among which the G8 summits, the United Nations Forum on Forest (UNFF), the Ministerial Conference on the Protection of Forest in Europe, the International Tropical Timber Organisation (ITTO) and the European Union with the Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade (FLEGT) programme.
The latter is the European Union’s first action as a follow up to the commitments taken during the World Summit on Sustainable Development of Johannesburg (2002). It was agreed to stop the current loss rate of natural resources and biological diversity. FLEGT is a joint action of EU countries aimed at coordinating tools and promoting responsible agreements and behaviours in the management of global forest.
Deforestation and global forest degradation are only partially compensated by the increase in forest surfaces in developed countries.
In Europe, for example, the forest surface has increased by 10% since the beginning of the 1960s. This is owed to considerable afforestation and reforestation programmes and, above all, the natural conversion of marginal and abandoned agricultural land into forest. Unfortunately, forests’ health conditions in countries with an increasing forest heritage are not encouraging. Inventory data and forest surveys carried out in many countries of the Northern hemisphere, from the boreal to the Mediterranean areas, show conditions of degradation, empoverishment of biological diversity and loss of productivity. This is due to a series of mainly human impacts such as arson, soil acidification, nitrogen compound deposits, damages related to ozone pollution and climate change and desertification.
22.7 % of the Italian territory (a surface covering 6.8 million hectares) is covered by woodland. Starting from the late 1940s, this surface is gradually and constantly growing.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

This trend is not only owed to reafforestation activities but also to the natural recolonization of abandoned agricultural land, which is probably growing.
From a cross-analysis of available sources we can remember that the thickly covered Italian forest surface, which is mainly composed of trees, measures 6.8-7.2 million hectares. There is also another forest area that can be added to this. However, this is difficult to assess since it derives from natural recolonization processes of non forest areas or from the deterioration of forest areas (fire) or the presence of thinner trees. If we realistically consider that this “transition surface” covers about 2.5 million hectares, we could say that just less than one third of the Italian surface can be classified as forest.