Land and Forest Iceland
Global Forest Loss Has Halved Compared to Previous Decades
24th November 2025
Between 1990 and 2000, global forest cover declined by an average of 10.7 million hectares each year. Over the past decade, this annual loss has slowed to an average of 4.14 million hectares. This reduced rate of decline is due partly to decreasing deforestation in some countries and expanding forest cover in others.
©FAO/Vasily Maksimov
Forests currently cover more than four billion hectares worldwide, with nearly half of this area located in the tropics. This corresponds to around one-third (32%) of the Earth’s land surface and means that, on average, there is half a hectare of forest for every person on the planet. The proportion of forest is highest in the tropical regions, at around 45%, followed by the boreal forests and then the temperate and warm-temperate zones.
These findings are presented in the FRA 2025 report, officially launched on 21 October. The publication provides a comprehensive global assessment of forest resources, produced under the auspices of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). Such assessments are released every five years.
At the regional level, Europe has the largest share of global forest cover, accounting for one quarter of the world’s forests. South America, however, has the highest proportion of forest relative to land area, with 49% of the continent classified as forest. More than half (54%) of the world’s forests are found in just five countries: Russia, Brazil, Canada, the United States and China. In Iceland, forest cover amounts to about two percent of the land area, of which birch woodland accounts for one and a half percent.
FAO’s news release highlights several innovations included in this edition of the FRA. These include enhanced and expanded digital tools that improve access to the underlying datasets:
An interactive online database containing all data and metadata from 236 countries and territories.
An application programming interface (API) enabling automated data retrieval and integration.
Country reports available in PDF format in all official UN languages.
The information compiled supports monitoring of international commitments, including the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, the Paris Agreement on Climate Change, the Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework, and the United Nations Strategic Plan for Forests 2017–2030.
The image below illustrates the forest cover across 67 member countries of the UNECE (United Nations Economic Commission for Europe), based on data from the FRA 2025 report. It indicates that Iceland's forest cover constitutes 0.6 percent of its total area, adhering to the international definition of forest, which specifies species reaching a minimum height of five meters at maturity. In Iceland, our domestic standard typically considers a height of two meters, under which the country's forest cover is approximately two percent.
