The pie graphs illustrate the share of the world’s forests and timber in five different regions, including South America, Africa, Asia, Europe and North America.
Overall, most regions have a higher timber output, except for Africa. Although Africa has the largest forest coverage, timber extraction is concentrated in North America.
Looking firstly at four of the five regions, the proportion of timber was higher than the corresponding share of the world’s forests. South Africa recorded the largest positive gap, with timber accounting for 23%, compared with only 16% of global forest areas. A similar pattern can be seen in North America, in which a high of 30% of timber is extracted from this region, whereas a quarter represents the forest region. The differences were smaller in Asia and Europe, yet the gap in Asia is twice as large as that in Europe. In detail, timber accounted for 18% in Asia, compared with 14% of the world’s forests, while the corresponding figures for Europe were 20% and 18%.
In contrast, Africa shows the opposite pattern and by far the largest disparity among the five regions. Despite containing the major share of the world’s forests, at 27%, the continent accounted for only 9% of global timber, a difference of 18 percentage points.