Protecting the earth's nearly four billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth's health, an important foundation for the new economy.
Protecting the earth’s nearly four billion hectares of remaining forests and replanting those already lost are both essential for restoring the earth’s health, an important foundation for the new economy.
Reducing rainfall runoff and the associated flooding and soil erosion, recycling rainfall inland, and restoring aquifer recharge depend on simultaneously reducing pressure on forests and on reforestation.
There is a vast unrealised potential in all countries to lessen the demands that are shrinking the earth’s forest cover. In industrial nations the greatest opportunity lies in reducing the quantity of wood used to make paper, and in developing countries it depends on reducing fuel wood use.
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The rates of paper recycling in the top 10 paper-producing countries range widely, from China and Finland on the low end, recycling 33 and 38 per cent of the paper they use, to South Korea and Germany on the high end, at 77 and 66 per cent.
The United States, the world’s largest paper consumer, is far behind South Korea, but it has raised the share of paper recycled from roughly one fourth in the early 1980s to 50 per cent in 2005.
