Though nearly 75 percent of the total industrial wood production comes from Northern Hemisphere industrial countries, the temperate forestlands of this region are expanding. The world's current industrial wood consumption requirements could be produced on only 5 percent of the world's total current forestland. About one-third of the earth's terrestrial area remains wilderness.
Tropical forests cover a land area that is almost exactly the size of South America.
Tropical and temperate forests together cover a land area the size of the Western Hemisphere. The rate of conversion of the tropical forests increased from 0.6 percent in 1980 to about 0.8 percent in 1990. Fully two-thirds of the deforestation in the United States occurred in the sixty years prior to 1910 and most of the other third before 1850. Although the United States has been the world's number one timber producer since World War II, U.S. forests have experienced an increase in volume in the past fifty years and have maintained roughly the same area over the past seventy-five years. The total area of forest and other wooded land in Europe increased by 2 million hectares annually between 1980 and 1990.