Forest area

Forest as a share of a country's land area.

Forest area is land of at least half a hectare with trees taller than five metres and a canopy cover above 10%, as a share of the country's land area. It includes plantations but not orchards or city parks. The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) compiles it every five years in its Global Forest Resources Assessment from national forest inventories and satellite data, with yearly values in between, and the World Bank republishes it. A rising share can mean new plantations as well as natural regrowth.

World map · Forest area

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

Over time · Forest area

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

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All countries · Forest area

Source: World Bank, World Development Indicators (updated 2026-10-08) · fetched 29 Oct 2026

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Every country and year, with the source on each row.

Portrait of Klaus Jürgen Folz

About the author

Hello there, I’m Klaus Jürgen Folz. I studied Mechanical Engineering at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS) in Brazil, and I work in Austria as a lead Python and Power BI developer. I built Data Mechanics because good decisions start with facts. Public data is often scattered, hard to find or locked behind paywalls, and too much of what we read about the world is biased. Here, every number is shown as it was published, next to its source, so anyone can check it, compare countries and leaders, and draw their own conclusions.