Irrational numbers: why the FAO’S forest assessments are misleading

This report argues that the Global Forest Resources Assessments (GFRA) of FAO is failing to do its job. The GFRA should be providing accurate information and credible data describing the state of forests in the world. However, as this report argues, the information from the GFRA is unreliable and highly misleading - the impact of this is obscuring understanding of the world’s forests, and seriously underestimating the extent of their degradation. Examples from Brazil and Indonesia illustrate these arguments.

Examples of the key problems with FAO’s approach include:

• the use of the term "net forest change", in which the loss of "natural" forests is cancelled out by the expansion of plantations, is meaningless and serves to hide the true extent of the loss of the world’s natural forests
• the impact of humans on forests is vastly underestimated; key processes of forest degradation and fragmentation are barely taken into account
• the definition of "forest", including all vegetation types with tree canopy cover over 10%, is too broad, making the data of limited value to scientists, forest managers and policy makers.

To address these problems, the Rainforest Foundation recommends that FAO makes the following amendments to its GFRA methodology:

• abandon the calculation of "net forest change". Deforestation estimates should refer to the loss of natural forest
• distinguish a number of different categories of forest on the basis of canopy cover
• assess all plantations separately from natural forests
• abandon the use of the category "temporary deforestation", and count these areas as deforested.