Countries by Forest Area per Person ТОП-100, 2026

Overview: why forest area per person changes the ranking

Total forest area mainly rewards geographic scale. Forest area per person adds demographic pressure to the comparison. A country can have enormous forests and still rank below a smaller country if its population is much larger. This is why Canada and Russia remain high, while Brazil falls below several less populous forest countries despite having one of the world’s largest forest estates.

The top of the ranking is shaped by two major patterns. In tropical South America and Central Africa, large rainforest areas are spread across small or moderate populations. In northern and boreal countries, extensive forest landscapes are paired with relatively low population density. The indicator therefore says more about the relationship between land, forests and population than about environmental performance alone.

Chart: Top 20 forest area per person values

The bar chart uses the same values as the Top 20 table. The first two bars are much longer than the rest, which shows how exceptional the forest-per-person ratio is in Suriname and Guyana.

Methodology

The ranking is calculated as total forest area divided by population. Forest area is converted into hectares, and the result is presented as hectares of forest per person. The table is sorted from the highest value to the lowest value. Values are rounded to two decimals for the per-person metric and to two decimals for total forest area in millions of hectares.

The 2026 label refers to the publication edition and latest comparable data snapshot. The World Bank forest-area indicator available for international comparison is sourced to FAOSTAT and covers the series through 2023. The World Bank population indicator is sourced from UN World Population Prospects and national statistical systems and runs through 2024. That timing is why the page avoids calling the figures “2026 forest measurements.”

Only countries and reporting economies with enough forest-area and population data are included in the ranked table. Where countries have very close values, rounding can affect the visual order. Small rank differences should not be overinterpreted, especially for countries with similar forest-per-person values or recent population revisions.

The indicator has clear limits. It does not show whether forests are primary, degraded, fragmented, legally protected, publicly accessible or sustainably managed. A high value can reflect low population density rather than better policy. A low value can reflect dense settlement or limited land area rather than poor forest stewardship.

Insights from the forest area per person ranking

The ranking highlights how forest abundance per resident is concentrated in low-density countries. Suriname and Guyana stand far above most of the world because their populations are small relative to their tropical forest area. Gabon shows a similar Central African pattern, while Canada and Russia show the boreal version of the same relationship: enormous forest area spread across comparatively few people.

The middle of the ranking is more mixed. It includes countries with large forest estates but much larger populations, such as Brazil, Peru and Colombia, as well as smaller countries where forests still occupy a meaningful share of land. By the lower part of the Top 100, the metric is often shaped by population density, settlement patterns and the limited size of national forest estates rather than by one simple policy factor.

The main reading is that forest area per person is a resource-pressure indicator. It tells us how much forest exists relative to the number of residents, but it does not tell us whether that forest is primary, fragmented, degraded, protected or sustainably managed.

What this ranking means for readers

Forest area per person helps readers separate absolute forest size from demographic pressure. A high value can point to large carbon-storage potential, major habitat responsibility and land-management choices that affect climate and biodiversity far beyond national borders.

For low-ranked countries, the result should not be treated as failure by itself. Dense countries may have less forest per resident because land is limited and population is large. In those places, smaller forests can still be highly valuable for cooling, flood control, recreation, biodiversity corridors and soil protection.

The ranking works best as a starting point. It should be read together with forest-change data, protected-area data, wildfire risk, biodiversity indicators and land-governance context before drawing conclusions about environmental performance.

FAQ

Sources

• World Bank World Development Indicators: Forest area, AG.LND.FRST.K2. Used as the comparable forest-area source for the ranking. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/AG.LND.FRST.K2
• World Bank World Development Indicators: Population, total, SP.POP.TOTL. Used for the population denominator in the per-person calculation. https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.POP.TOTL
• FAO Global Forest Resources Assessment 2025. Used for international forest-resource context and forest definition. https://www.fao.org/forest-resources-assessment/en/
• FAO FRA 2025 data platform. Used as the current FAO reference point for forest-resource reporting. https://fra-data.fao.org/
• UN DESA World Population Prospects 2024. Used for population-estimate context behind international population series. https://population.un.org/wpp/