Globally, the dominant trends for forest products are an increasing demand for wood (resulting from increasing populations and increasing incomes) from a diminishing, or more restricted, forest supply base. As forests are cleared, degraded, or withdrawn from production for conservation purposes or other reasons, the burden placed on the remaining production forest increases commensurately. Considerable attention has, consequently, focused on identifying means of alleviating potential wood and fibre shortfalls. For some countries a primary solution has been to increase imports of forest products markedly, thereby redistributing demand to forest-rich countries. Other solutions have included increased levels of recycling, improved processing conversion efficiencies, increased utilization of harvesting residues, and the establishment of forest plantations.
In recent years FAO has intensified its efforts to quantify the potential extent of future wood supplies from forest plantations. Within the context of the Forest Resources Assessment considerable effort has been applied to collating and refining data on forest plantation areas, species and yields. Additional efforts have been applied to developing estimates of national plantation age-class distributions, collating information on annual increments for key species in various countries, and modelling estimates of global plantation woodflows. Nonetheless, much basic plantation forest inventory data (area, age-class, increment, and species) remains incomplete, inaccurate, obsolete or otherwise unreliable for many countries. Many of the other key variables, for example, impacts of intensified management regimes, genetic gains from tree improvement programmes, and harvesting and processing technologies remain unmeasured or unreported. However, global plantation data is being continuously improved, not least through the efforts of the global Forest Resource Assessment 2000 (FRA 2000). While there remains considerable scope to improve and refine forecasts of global plantation wood production, there is increasing consensus between forecasters as to the order of magnitude to which plantation wood production will belong. This paper provides an overview of the key parameters that will determine future plantation wood and fibre production, as well as presenting results of some recent modelling efforts.
