Indicators for timber and other forest products

 

View the timber and other forest products chapter of 'UK Indicators of Sustainable Forestry', as published in October 2002.

Any recent developments, and links to additional information, are shown below.

D1. Volume of growing stock

• There was an error affecting all the figures for conifers in England, compiled for EFSOS in 2001 and published in the indicators in 2002. The England conifer figures should have been 325 thousand hectares, 50 million m³ growing stock and 3.8 million m³ annual increment. These changes, which also alter the UK totals, just correct the error in EFSOS; they do not incorporate new modelling information.

• Revised figures for growing stock and annual increment, based on modelling from National Inventory of Woodland and Trees 1995-99, may now be available in 2008.

D2. Harvesting compared with annual increment

• The error reported for D1 also affects the conifer annual increment figure for England in this indicator. The England figure should have been 3.8 million m³, and UK total 16.3 million m³.

• For revised GB figures for harvesting see D3. 

• Revised figures for growing stock and annual increment, based on modelling from National Inventory of Woodland and Trees 1995-99, may now be available in 2008.

D3. Timber production and future availability

• New figures for timber removals (production) were published in September 2007 in Forestry Facts & Figures 2007 (Table 5). These are UK totals (including Northern Ireland).

million m³ overbark standing

Sources:
Forestry Facts & Figures 2007 and related working tables

• Further details of the 2000 forecast, presented in the published indicators, is available from an article originally published in the April 2001 issue of Forestry & British Timber.

• A new forecast of softwood availability was published in September 2006.
  

• A more comprehensive assessment of the hardwood resource, based on National Inventory of Woodland and Trees 1995-99, may now be available in 2007.

D4. Home-grown timber as % of consumption

• Homegrown timber in 2005 met about 16% of UK consumption of wood products (excluding recycled material). Forestry Statistics 2007 Table 3.1 gives annual figures for the ten years 1997 to 2006. The calculation of apparent consumption now totally excludes recovered paper. The former basis, used for UKISF 2002 and for Forestry Statistics until 2006, excluded waste paper recovery but included recovered paper in imports and exports. The increased volumes of recovered paper exports in recent years increasingly distorted the apparent consumption calculated on the former basis.

D5. Carbon storage

• More information about how forests in the UK contribute to the carbon cycle is given by a (June 2003) Forestry Commission Information Note by Mark Broadmeadow and Robert Matthews of Forest Research.

• Updated estimates of 'removals to forestland' as calculated for Climate Change: The UK Programme 2006 (Defra, 2006) are given in Forestry Statistics 2007 Table 4.3.