FOREST RESOURCES

Much of the Philippines is hilly and mountainous, with 52 percent of its total land area of 30 million hectares, equivalent to 15.8 million hectares, officially classified as forestland administered by the Department of Environment and Natural Resources.

Situationer:

• Of the country’s total land area of 30 million hectares, around 53 percent of it is classified as forestland, with slopes ranging from 18 percent and above.  But not all is covered with forest cover.

  
  

• Based on the 2001-2003 satellite imageries, the country’s total forest cover is estimated at 7.168 million hectares, or 24.27% of the total land area. The remaining 8 million hectares are unproductive, open, denuded or degraded.

  
  

• Of the total forest cover, open forest accounted for more than half at 4.031 million hectares.  The rest of the forest types contributed to the total as follows:  closed forest at 2.56 million hectares (35.71%), plantation forest at 329,746 hectares (4.60%), and mangrove natural forest at around 247,309 hectares (3.45%).

  
  

• Historically, the country was known to harbor one of the world’s lush tropical rainforests.  When the Spanish colonizers entered the archipelago in 1521, it was reported that  90 percent of  the country’s total land area or 27 million hectares were covered with forest. 

  
  

• About two years after the Americans substituted the Spanish sometime in 1900, the country’s forest cover was recorded at about 70 percent or 21 million hectares. 

  
  

• Between 1934 and 1941, forest cover further declined to around 17 million hectares or 57 percent of the land area.

  
  

• A national inventory conducted in 1982-88 by the RP-German Forest Resources Inventory Project of the DENR Forest Management Bureau (FMB) estimated forest cover at 6.46 million hectares or 21.5 percent of the total land area in 1988.

  
  

• In the 1990 Master Plan for Forestry Development (MPFD) prepared by the Forest Management Bureau, it was estimated that the total forest loss between 1934 and 1990 was about 10.9 million hectares, equivalent to an average annual loss of 194,000 hectares. 

  
  

• There are around 3,000 tree species known to thrive in the country, with 96 of them known to have medicinal values.

For more info about Philippine forest resources: click here http://forestry.denr.gov.ph/fmb.denr.gov.ph