The table illustrates the area of forested land in millions of hectares in several regions around the globe, namely Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Oceania and South America.
Overall, Europe registered the largest forested land over the three studied years. In addition,while Asia and Europe experienced an increase in the area of forested land, other areas witnessed the opposite trend.
In 1990, Europe led with 989 million hectares of forested land, about 413 million hectares more than the forest area in Asia. Afterward, the figure increased by nearly 10 million hectares in 2000 before reaching more than 1000 million hectares in 2005. Similarly, the forest area in Asia climbed from 567 million hectares to 584 million hectares in 2005 despite a moderate decrease between the year 1990 and 2000.
Turning to the remaining regions, the area of forested land in North America was approximately 3.5 times that in Oceania in 1990, 708 million hectares for the former and 199 million hectares for the latter). Then, the figures for these two regions slightly decreased by three and two million hectares respectively in 2005. A similar trend could be observed in Africa, with the forest area in 2005 being more than 50 million hectares smaller than that in 1990.
