The Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations (FAO) has published a revised classification of forest products, closing a 40-year gap since the last revision in 1981. Source: Timberbiz
The Classification and definitions of forest products 2022 incorporates many new products, including engineered wood products, to reflect innovation and change in the forest sector.
“The structure of the forest industry has shifted significantly in the last four decades towards high value products and increasingly diverse end-uses, often driven by technological improvements and innovations,” said FAO Forestry Officer Ashley Steel.
“These changes are reflected in new classification codes, which will enable the collection, compilation, analysis and dissemination of high-quality global data on forest products that is comparable across countries.”
The revised classification covers the entire spectrum of primary and secondary wood and paper products: wood taken from forests or from trees outside forests; bark and cork; charcoal; wood and wood-based materials resulting from processing; and recovered paper and recoverable wood products.
“This revised classification will inform statistics that are vital for building a sustainable bioeconomy and addressing challenges such as illegal logging, enabling small-scale production, and promoting renewable forest products as substitutes for fossil-based products with higher carbon footprints,” said FAO forest product statistics specialist Iana Arkhipova.
The new publication results from a long collaboration with the UN Statistics Division Expert Group on International Statistical Classifications and a joint team of specialists on forest product statistics from FAO and the UN Economic Commission for Europe.
FAO has been producing data on the global production and trade of major wood products since1947. FAO and the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe published the first version of the Classification of forest products in 1973. Three updates have now been published, in 1979,1981 and 2022.
Download the publication Classification of Forest Products 2022 FAO.
