Forest Area 1997

Report year 1997·Data year 1997

Forest area (% of land area)·Neither end is better — this is a shape, not a score·Published by Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO)

34 reference years (1990–2023), covering 178 to 214 countries — one of the most complete panels on the site — from FAOSTAT, fetched through the World Bank’s indicator API (AG.LND.FRST.ZS). ⚠ NEITHER END IS BETTER, so this indicator carries no good/bad colouring anywhere on the site and does not feed its topics’ rankings — it is charted on them, not scored by them. Suriname is 97% forest and Qatar is 0%, and the difference between them is climate rather than policy. What a country does to its OWN figure over time is the part that carries meaning, which is what the trend line on each country’s card shows. ⚠ A zero here is a real reading — some countries genuinely have no forest. ⚠ These are not separate published reports — `restatedByReport` names the World Development Indicators release they were pulled from. ⚠ A statistic, not an index. ⚠ No rank is published. A POSITION is derived here (2026-09-10) by ordering the score LARGEST FIRST, and it is a SIZE ORDER rather than a league table: this measure has no better end, so position 1 names the country with the biggest figure and says nothing about how that country is doing. The change arrows stay grey for the same reason, and the indicator is still left out of the Country Index.

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