Overview - Forestry
What data can I find here and how are they collected?
Eurostat publishes annual data on forestry which come from two different 'questionnaires'.
- The Joint Forest Sector Questionnaire (JFSQ):
It provides statistics on the production and trade in wood and wood products. These data provide information for supply balances of wood products, in order to see for instance whether supply matches demand due to competing uses for material and energy, and are used for comparison with other countries around the world. - The European Forest Accounts:
These accounts collect annual statistics on the area and value of wooded land, the quantity and value of timber, the economic activities of forestry and logging, and employment in the sector. These data are essential to assess the economic viability of forestry.
The Joint Forest Sector Questionnaire is part of a worldwide exercise in which Eurostat is responsible for the data collection in the EU Member States and EFTA countries. Our international partners are UNECE, FAO and ITTO. The European Forest Accounts is part of the Eurostat environmental satellite accounts initiative that started in the late 1990s.
Why are data on forestry needed?
There were 159 million hectares of forests in the European Union in 2020, making up about 38% of its land area.
Apart from the traditional production of wood and other forest-based products, forests are increasingly valued for their environmental role. For several decades, environmental forest functions have attracted increasing attention — for example, in relation to the protection of biodiversity and, more recently, in the context of climate change and energy policies (wood being classified as renewable energy source).
For the time being, there is no official data collection that provides quantitative information about environmental or ecological functions of forests, i.e. the ecosystem services forests provide to the society, other than timber and fuelwood provisioning. However, Eurostat is a partner in an EU-level project to develop an integrated system of natural capital accounting - INCA - which aims to provide this information.
