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LISTENING
STUDY Question 72:
What is the percentage of paper fiber coming from natural
forests vs. tree plantations?
LISTENING
STUDY: Several responses state a specific percentage
of fiber coming from tree plantations.
Currently,
plantations account for less than one-third of fibre
for paper, but the global trend is for increasing reliance
on plantations or intensively managed forests which
resemble plantations and towards large scale forest
enterprise, with natural forests being increasingly
managed for multiple-uses and conservation. - Robins
1996
In
the mid-1990s, pulpwood plantations furnished about
16 percent of the world's total fiber supply for paper.
Second-growth forests provided 30 percent, and old-growth
forests 9 percent. (Total of 55 percent virgin wood)
- Abramovitz 1999
Indonesia's
pulp and paper industry demands far more wood than its
plantations can supply. As a result more and more tropical
rainforest area is being destroyed. Between 1988 and
1999 a mere 8 percent of the wood used for pulp originated
from plantations, the remaining 92 percent came from
tropical rainforests. - Friends of the Earth International
2002
Very
low (likely less than 1%) in Maine. - Robert R. Bryan,
Forest Ecologist, Maine Audubon
Given
the absence of a global information system on fibre
sources, IIED commissioned a survey of the situation
in 1993 which revealed that:
- managed natural regeneration forests are the single
largest source of wood fibre (37 per cent);
- unmanaged natural regeneration forests account for
17 per cent of wood fibre supply;
- plantations provide 29 per cent of global wood pulp
- original conifer forests account for 15 per cent of
total wood pulp;
- tropical rainforests provide only 1 per cent of global
wood pulp, and original hardwood forests elsewhere in
the world provide another 1 per cent. - World Business
Council for Sustainable Development 1996
In
several countries industrial wood production from forest
plantations has significantly substituted for wood supply
from natural forest resources. Forest plantations in
New Zealand met 99 percent of the country's needs for
industrial roundwood in 1997; the corresponding figure
in Chile was 84 percent, Brazil 62 percent, and Zambia
and Zimbabwe 50 percent each. - Food and Agriculture
Organization of the United Nations 2000
LISTENING
STUDY: Other responses do not specify percentages.
In
the southeast, most of International Paper's land is
4th and 5th rotation plantation forest. About 30% of
the fiber in our paper products comes from our own lands.
We do not track statistics for "natural" versus "plantation"
for fiber that comes from other people's land. As the
Southern Forest Resource Assessment details, the forests
of the U.S. south are generally healthy and sustainably
managed. Even with the projected increase in plantation
forests over the next 40 years, natural forests (which
generally have grown up from abandoned farm fields)
will still dominate the southern landscape. Therefore,
we are not concerned that the natural forests of the
southeast are endangered. We do, however, believe that
certain ecological communities within the forests from
which we obtain tree fiber are endangered; these communities
are catalogued by Nature Serve: www.natureserve.org/explorer.
As part of our commitment to the Sustainable Forestry
Initiative (SFI) Program, we protect and conserve such
communities. In addition, the SFI Program obligates
us to manage on a landscape level while also providing
wildlife habitat and biodiversity at the stand level
of the forest. - International Paper
This
information is not readily available. - Stora Enso
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