UN Doubts Natural Forests Alone Can Meet the World’s Demand for Timber
Forest set aside mainly for wood production has shrunk by 29.8 million hectares since 1990, the Food and Agriculture Organization found, with planted forest growth slowing.
Barcode-tagged New Zealand radiata pine logs wait at a log yard in China. Intensively managed plantations make up half of the world's planted forest area, FAO estimates. (Photo Credit: Supplied to Wood Central / Central PR Group by Steve Walker, Terrafolia Advisory)
The world may need to plant between 20 and 40 million more hectares of productive forest by mid-century, with demand for wood products projected to climb by a third by 2050. That is according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), which released The State of the World’s Forests 2026 in Rome last week.
“Standing natural forests alone are unlikely to meet this demand,” wrote FAO’s Christophe Besacier and Valentina Garavaglia, who coordinated the report and co-wrote its opening chapter. They warned of a “structural imbalance” between demand and sustainable supply, with population growth and the expanding bioeconomy driving demand for forest products.
It comes as the world’s production forests shrank by 29.8 million hectares between 1990 and 2025, according to the FAO’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Planted forests grew by 120 million hectares to 312 million over the same period, though their expansion slowed over the past decade.
Production is the main management objective for 29 per cent of the world’s forests, whilst 18 per cent has no known objective and 15 per cent is managed for multiple use. Shares sum to 99 per cent because of rounding. (Source: FAO. 2026. The State of the World’s Forests 2026, Figure 2.4. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Graphic: Wood Central) This adaptation was not created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this adaptation. The original English edition shall be the authoritative edition.
An extra 33 million hectares of highly productive plantations would be needed to meet rising demand for industrial roundwood alone by 2050, the report’s authors estimate. Sub-Saharan Africa may need more than 300,000 hectares of new planted forest every year by 2030, with fuelwood making up 90 per cent of Africa’s wood harvest.
Intensively managed monocultures “can hardly be considered as restored stands”, cautioned FAO’s Benjamin De Ridder and the Society for Ecological Restoration’s James G. Hallett. Such plantations may still suit some landscapes, said the pair, who led the report’s chapter on restoration pathways.
Plantations also cost nearly six times as much per hectare to establish as assisted natural regeneration, according to project cost data adapted for the report. Of the dozen restoration methods compared, only irrigation-led projects and silvopasture, which combines trees with grazing, cost more.
Japan’s exporters say decades of post-war planting have left the country with more mature cedar and cypress than its own builders want. Hisao Yamada, chairman of the Japan Wood-Products Export Association, told importers in Melbourne on Monday that more than half of Japan’s planted forests are now older than 50 years.
Global wood removals totalled 3.86 billion cubic metres in 2023, in nearly equal parts industrial roundwood and fuelwood, according to FAO’s Yelena Finegold and colleagues. The team, which led the report’s chapter on restoration progress, expects removals to keep climbing for decades as consumption grows with population and incomes.
New forest is also spreading more slowly, with forest expansion falling to 6.78 million hectares per year over the past decade, down from 9.88 million between 2000 and 2015. Deforestation eased to 10.9 million hectares a year over the same decade, down from 13.6 million, the report reveals.
Deforestation has fallen in every period since the 1990s, when it ran at 17.6 million hectares a year, whilst new forest growth peaked between 2000 and 2015. (Source: FAO. 2026. The State of the World’s Forests 2026, Figure 1.2, from the Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Licence: CC BY 4.0. Graphic: Wood Central) This adaptation was not created by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). FAO is not responsible for the content or accuracy of this adaptation. The original English edition shall be the authoritative edition.
“We know demand already exceeds supply and is set to grow,” Richard Briggs, group manager of delivery and partnerships at New Zealand’s Energy Efficiency and Conservation Authority (EECA), said of wood fuel. The agency backed five wood collection hubs and four proposed fuel plants last week for manufacturers still burning gas and coal.
China imported US$2.87 billion of wood and wooden furniture from Russia and $2.21 billion from New Zealand in 2025, according to UN Comtrade data. It sent $6.22 billion of the same goods to the United States and $1.64 billion to Australia over the same year.
China’s trade in wood and wooden furniture in 2025, with imports by origin in red and exports by destination in charcoal, each line’s width scaled to its value in US dollars. Russia, Vietnam, and New Zealand were the largest sources mapped and the United States the largest destination. (Source: UN Comtrade, reporter China, HS 44 and 940330 to 940360, 2025. Graphic: Wood Central)
From 2027, the UN Decade for Afforestation and Reforestation aims to increase forest cover and strengthen the sustainable supply of wood, according to the report. Its authors cited “ecologically inappropriate tree planting and poorly governed forest expansion” among the risks seen during the current UN restoration decade.
Dr Qu Dongyu, FAO’s Director-General, told ministers at the Committee on Forestry last week that one of his priorities was to shift FAO’s forest work towards “greater emphasis on sustainable production”. Production, he said, “does not only refer to agricultural production, but it also includes forest production”.
Source: https://woodcentral.com.au/un-doubts-natural-forests-alone-can-meet-the-worlds-demand-for-timber/
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