International Forestry Statistics on Area, Carbon, and Wood Trade

Forestry Statistics 2020, released on 24 September 2020, provides official UK National Statistics on international forestry. The data cover forest area, carbon stocks, wood production, and trade in wood products. Where possible, figures are also provided for England, Wales, Scotland, and Northern Ireland.

Use Cases

• Analyzing global forest carbon sequestration potential based on carbon stocks data.
• Modeling international wood product supply chains using trade statistics.
• Benchmarking national forestry performance against international figures on forest area.
• Assessing environmental and economic impacts of forestry using combined social, employment, and finance statistics.

Strengths

• Data are official UK National Statistics, produced by the Forestry Commission and released under arrangements approved by the UK Statistics Authority.
• The dataset synthesizes multiple thematic areas including woodland area, planting, timber, trade, carbon, environment, social, employment, and finance & prices.
• It is available on multiple platforms (eu_open_data, uk_data), indicating cross-platform validation and accessibility.

Limitations

• Key metadata such as row count, specific column names, file size, and license are unknown across all sources.
• The data's temporal coverage is anchored to a single reference year (2020), limiting analysis of trends.
• The most recent metadata update date (2026-06-29) is inconsistent with the 2020 data release, suggesting potential metadata staleness.

Provenance

Source

Forestry Commission (UK)

Collection Method

Published as part of the official web publication 'Forestry Statistics 2020' and its extract 'Forestry Facts & Figures 2020'.

Time Range

2020

Freshness

The core statistics were released on 24 September 2020. A metadata record was last updated on 2026-06-29.

Geography

International, with sub-national figures for the UK (England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland) where possible.