The most wooded countries in the world

The forest is the lungs of the planet, a source of resources and habitat for many species of plants and animals. The total area of the Earth's forests is just over 4 billion hectares, and the total volume of wood is 527 billion km.
Which countries can be considered the most wooded? It depends on the approach. Based on information from THE WORLD BANK, which collects and analyzes data from relevant agencies, 2 rankings have been formed: countries with the largest area of forests and with the largest percentage of the total area covered by forest. Interestingly, the top five of these ratings do not overlap in any way.

So, if we focus on the area of forest lands (forest plantations with trees at least 5 m high are taken into account, not counting gardens and parks), then the top 5 looks like this:

1. Russia - 8,153,116 km2

2. Brazil - 4,966,196 km2

3. Canada – 3,469,281 km2

4. USA - 3,097,950 km2

5. China - 2,199,781 km2

Greenland was in the last place among the countries in which there is a forest at all – only 2 km2. And in 5 countries forests are less than 1 km2 or not at all. These are Curacao, the Faroe Islands, Monaco, Nauru and Qatar, they occupy places from 206 to 210.

The second rating is based on the percentage of the country's territory occupied by forest. It looks like this:

1. Suriname – 98.3%

2. Micronesia – 91.9%

3. Gabon – 90%

4. Seychelles – 88.41%

5. Palau – 87.61%

Russia is in the middle of the list with 49%.


To preserve the biological diversity of the forest, it is necessary to create specially protected natural territories (protected areas). Brazil is the leader in this indicator. Here, protected areas occupy 89.5 million hectares. In Russia, the area of national parks, nature reserves and reserves of federal significance is 17.5 million hectares, and if we take into account all forests with restricted forest use, this is almost 25% of the total area.