Russia has the most forest of any country, with about 815 million hectares, followed by Brazil with about 494 million hectares and Canada with about 347 million hectares, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) land-use data for 2022. The United States (310 million) and China (224 million) complete the top five, and those five countries alone hold more than half of all the forest on Earth. The exact figures depend heavily on what is counted as "forest", so this article starts with the definition before the ranking.
What the FAO counts as a forest: 0.5 hectares, 5 metres, 10 percent cover
More than 800 definitions of forest are in use around the world. Some are legal, so land designated as forest stays forest even after it has been clear-cut; some are based on land use; and some are based purely on how much of the ground is shaded by tree crowns. For international comparisons, almost everyone uses the FAO definition, because it is the one that national governments report against.
Under it, a forest is land of more than 0.5 hectares with trees taller than 5 metres and a canopy cover of more than 10 percent, or with young trees able to reach those thresholds where they stand. Land used mainly for farming or towns is excluded even if it is covered in trees. That rule has large consequences: in FAO's explanatory notes, oil palm plantations, fruit orchards, olive groves and agroforestry systems where crops grow under trees are not forest in FAO statistics. Sparser land, with 5 to 10 percent canopy or mixed shrubs and trees, goes into a separate category called "other wooded land".
The data come from the Global Forest Resources Assessment, which the FAO has run at five- to ten-year intervals since the first edition in 1948. National correspondents nominated by each government compile the figures from their own inventories, supported by remote sensing. The 2020 assessment put the world's forests at 4.06 billion hectares, or 31 percent of the land, and found that 54 percent of them lay in just five countries: Russia (20.1 percent of the world total), Brazil (12.2), Canada (8.6), the United States (7.6) and China (5.4).
The same assessment tracks change over time, and that is where it is most useful. By its figures the world had 4.24 billion hectares of forest in 1990, 4.16 billion in 2000, 4.11 billion in 2010 and 4.06 billion in 2020, a net loss of about 178 million hectares in thirty years, roughly the area of Libya. The losses were concentrated in the tropics, while Asia (counted with Russia in the FAO regional tables) gained forest, rising from 1.39 billion to 1.44 billion hectares over the same period.
Rival figures from Moscow, Ottawa and Global Forest Watch
National statistics often disagree with the FAO figure for the same country, because governments keep their own categories. Russia's forestry data for 2015 put the country's forest area at more than 885 million hectares, about 45 percent of its territory, well above the FAO number. Canada's own description of its forests gives around 3.69 million square kilometres, roughly half the country, compared with FAO's 3.47 million square kilometres, or 39.5 percent of the land. Australia's own inventory put its native forest at about 147 million hectares in 2009, again above the FAO figure for 2022. Neither side is simply wrong: each national agency follows its own categories and survey methods, while FAO applies one definition to every country.
Satellites offer a third view. Global Forest Watch, run by the World Resources Institute with the University of Maryland and other partners, maps tree cover from satellite imagery rather than from national reports. Tree cover is not the same as forest: a young oil palm plantation shows up as trees from space, while a recently burnt boreal forest may not. Its figures are best used for tracking change, and the World Resources Institute estimates that between 2000 and 2020 the world lost 101 million hectares of tree cover, 92 percent of it in tropical and subtropical forests.
The ranking below uses the FAO figures for 2022, since they apply one definition to every country. Areas are rounded to the nearest 0.1 million hectares; one million hectares equals 10,000 square kilometres.
FAO's 2022 forest area ranking, from Russia to Peru
| Rank | Country | Forest area (million ha) | Share of land area |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Russia | 815.3 | 49.8% |
| 2 | Brazil | 494.2 | 59.1% |
| 3 | Canada | 346.9 | 39.5% |
| 4 | United States | 309.8 | 33.9% |
| 5 | China | 223.7 | 23.8% |
| 6 | Australia | 134.0 | 17.4% |
| 7 | DR Congo | 124.0 | 54.7% |
| 8 | Indonesia | 90.9 | 48.0% |
| 9 | India | 72.7 | 24.4% |
| 10 | Peru | 72.0 | 56.2% |
Measured by share of land rather than total area, the order changes completely, because small countries with few people and heavy rainfall can be almost entirely wooded. French Guiana, an overseas region of France, is 96.6 percent forest, followed by Suriname (94.5 percent), Guyana (93.5 percent), the Federated States of Micronesia and Gabon (91.2 percent). Among large developed countries, Finland (73.7 percent), Sweden (68.7 percent) and Japan (68.4 percent) are the most heavily forested. At the other end, the large countries in the top ten with the lowest shares are Australia at 17.4 percent, where most of the interior is desert and dry grassland, and China at 23.8 percent, where the arid north-west has very little tree cover.
The boreal giants: Russia, Canada and the United States
Russia's 815 million hectares are mostly taiga, the boreal forest of larch, spruce, pine, fir and birch that runs from Karelia on the Finnish border to the Pacific coast. Forest covers almost exactly half of Russia's land, and its sheer extent makes the country the world's second-largest producer of industrial roundwood, as of 2022. Yet a 2012 study by the FAO and the Russian government found that Russia's share of global trade in forest products was below 4 percent, because so much of the taiga is remote from roads and rivers that can carry timber out. The biome itself is described in our guide to the boreal forest, or taiga.
Canada's 347 million hectares are overwhelmingly boreal as well, stretching from Yukon to Newfoundland and Labrador. Over 90 percent of Canada's forests are publicly owned Crown or provincial land, and about half are allocated for logging. Different regions have their own character: red spruce dominates the Maritimes, black spruce the eastern Laurentian region, and western hemlock, red cedar, Douglas fir and Sitka spruce the wet Pacific coast.
The United States, fourth with 310 million hectares, has a mix of boreal forest in Alaska, temperate conifer forest in the Pacific Northwest and the Rockies, and broadleaf and pine forest across the East and South. North and Central America as a region have held their forest area almost steady, at 755 million hectares in 1990 and 753 million in 2020.
From the Amazon to the Great Green Wall: Brazil, China and the rest of the top ten
Brazil's 494 million hectares make it the leader in tropical forest. About 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest lies inside Brazil, with 13 percent in Peru and 10 percent in Colombia; the whole forest covers some 6 million square kilometres of a 7-million-square-kilometre basin and holds an estimated 390 billion trees of about 16,000 species. Brazil also contains the Atlantic Forest along its coast. South America as a whole lost forest faster than any other region, falling from 974 million hectares in 1990 to 844 million in 2020, a pattern examined in our article on Amazon deforestation.
China, fifth with 224 million hectares, is the clearest example of forest being planted rather than inherited. The Three-North Shelter Forest Program, often called the Great Green Wall, began in 1978 and is planned to run until about 2050, building belts of trees across the north to hold back the Gobi and other deserts; in November 2024 the government reported that a 3,000-kilometre green belt around the Taklamakan Desert had been completed. Because FAO counts young trees that can reach 5 metres, these plantations enter the statistics long before they look like mature forest.
Australia, sixth with 134 million hectares, is dominated by eucalypts and other hardwoods rather than pines, and it shows how fire complicates the numbers. The 2019–20 Black Summer fires burnt more than 24 million hectares, largely in the south-east, yet burnt forest that regrows is still forest under the FAO definition. Seventh-placed DR Congo holds the largest share of the Congolian rainforest, the world's second-largest tropical forest, which spreads across six countries and contains about a quarter of the world's remaining tropical forest; our Amazon versus Congo rainforest comparison sets the two side by side.
Africa's total forest area fell from 743 million hectares in 1990 to 637 million in 2020, the second-largest regional loss after South America. Indonesia, eighth with 91 million hectares, is a case where the FAO definition matters: its extensive oil palm estates are classed as agriculture, not forest, however tall the palms grow. India, ninth with 73 million hectares, and Peru, tenth with 72 million, round out the list; Peru's forest lies mainly in the Amazon lowlands east of the Andes, which is why it covers 56 percent of the country despite the deserts of its Pacific coast.