The quote in the title of this post comes from Ian Miller’s excellent book Fir and Empire: The Transformation of Forests in Early Modern China (University of Washington Press, 2024). In the first chapter, the author illustrates how resource depletion during the Southern Song dynasty in 12th century China led to widespread and longstanding efforts to replant fir trees for timber consumption. This example is one of the earliest I have found to illustrate how scarcity results in action, even when those actions do not result in immediate production increases.
Although tree planting is not a contemporary innovation, it has become a fixture of modern forestry for at least the last 100 years. However, we may be have passed a zenith. In Reversing Deforestation (Stanford University Press, 2024), my colleague Douglas Southgate and I argue that economic forces promoted the establishment and management of forest planting all over the world. The recent FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment (2025) counts 311 million hectares of planted forests. In the most recent five-year period, the area of planted forests increased by 2 million hectares per year but the rate of increase in planted forests has declined by two-thirds in the past 15 years (Figure 1).
Figure 1: Annual percentage Change in Area of Planted Forests Globally (FAO Global Forest Resource Assessment, 2025)
Of the numerous explanations for this slowdown, economic ones – namely waning growth in industrial wood consumption and rising productivity in planted forests due to management – are the most potent. Carbon fertilization and climate change are gaining in importance but their effect is multiplied by market forces that favor more intensive management.
Today, wood production looks increasingly like agricultural production: Intensification (i.e., increasing yields on existing hectares), rather than expansion of plantation hectares or old growth extraction, is leading the way.
The intensification revolution in forestry has been underway for some time. Colodette et al. (2014) report plantation yield increases of more than 2% per year over the last 25 years in Brazil. Over a longer period (1960 to 2017), Davis (2021) estimates that Southern pine (Pinus taeda) yields increased 1.5% per year. However, Davis attributed only 41% of this to improved management, with the rest resulting from other factors like climate change and carbon fertilization, as well as the synergistic effects of management responses to climate and carbon fertilization.
This pace of yield growth on many plantations has exceeded the pace of consumption growth. According to FAO, industrial roundwood growth averaged 1.0% per year from 1961 to 2023, falling from 1.3% per year before 2000 to 0.6% per year after 2000. Growth in total roundwood consumption, which includes wood used as fuel, has similarly fallen over time from 0.8% per year before 2000 to 0.5% per year since. The biggest slowdown in growth happened with sawlogs.
In physical terms, industrial roundwood consumption increased 16.7 million m3 per year after 2000. Last century, the best bet would have been that new plantations or old growth forests were harvested to meet this new timber consumption. This century, it has been a different story.
Using the Global Timber Model (GTM) database, I estimate that the annual increase in timber output on the 820.5 million hectares around the world that GTM incorporates as accessible forests available for timber harvesting is 16.4 million m3 per year (Table 1). These increases are due to increased forest management on 90 million hectares of intensively managed plantations and carbon fertilization and climate change on all hectares.
It’s rather astounding to imagine that forest management and climatic factors together are producing new wood in forests already managed for timber purposes in sufficient quantities to meet new demand. Increases due to management alone (excluding climate and carbon fertilization) account for 25% of this gain – up to 4 million m3 per year of new wood.
In this context, the new data on slowing plantation establishment makes sense. Markets have incorporated expectations of declining consumption growth and volume gains on productive forestlands by slowing the pace of new plantation establishment.
Table 1: Calculation of potential new annual production on existing plantations and managed forests. Estimate based on area of forests in 2025 managed for timber production in the Global Timber Model (see Daigneault et al., 2025, for latest version), current average yield, and predicted growth in yield based on forest management, carbon fertilization and forest management.
|
Area
(million ha) |
Yield
(m3/ha/yr) |
Growth
(%) |
New production
(m3/yr) |
|
| Intensive Plantations |
90.1 |
7.2 | 1.50% |
9,782,291 |
| Other managed |
730.4 |
1.2 | 0.75% |
6,579,565 |
| Total |
820.5 |
1.9 | — |
16,361,856 |
Other factors play a role as well, including shifts in subsidy programs, rising competition for land, and environmental regulations. However, this movement away from expansion of planted forests and towards intensification of existing plantations bears watching as it will have a strong influence on future wood supply and forest carbon flux.