Forests cover 44 percent of Europe’s land area and they continue to expand. At just over 1 billion hectares, or 1.26 hectares per capita, 25 percent of the world’s forests are in Europe. About 80 percent of this forest is in the Russian Federation.
The forest area in Europe increased by almost 13 million hectares - that’s roughly the size of Greece – from 1990 to 2005. The expansion is mainly due to planting of new forests and natural expansion of forests onto former agricultural land.
The total growing stock of forests in Europe is 112 billion cubic metres. From 1990 to 2005, an average of 358 million cubic metres – equivalent to the total growing stock of Slovenia – was added each year. The figure below shows the forest area in percent of land area by country, in 2005.
Forest biomass carbon reserves are huge, and increasing. By 2005, 53 gigatonnes of carbon were stored in forest biomass, an increase of 2 billion tonnes since 1990. Further substantial amounts of carbon are stored in forest litter and soils.
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