GEO-6 Regional Assessment for Asia and the Pacific


2.3.4 State and trends


Remaining forest cover The remaining forest cover in the Asia and the Pacific region is 722 million hectares or 24.67 per cent of the land area (Figure 2.3.4). From 2000–2015, the forested area in China increased by 31.3 million hectares. In 2015, 208 million hectares or 21.67 per cent of its land was covered by forests, of which 119 million hectares were natural forests, and 79 million hectares plantations, the largest plantation cover in the world (FAO 2015a).


Approximately 32.6 per cent of 6.39 million hectares of Indian forests are under different stages of fragmentation, and highly fragmented regions across the Indian landscape harbour a number of endemic species, some of them of medicinal importance, that need conservation (Roy et al. 2013). Land-cover change and fragmentation of forests in the Nepal’s Kailash Sacred Landscape are negatively impacting various ecosystem services (Uddin et al. 2015).


Figure 2.3.4: Asia and the Pacific forest area, 1990 –2015 by sub-region


10 20 30 40 50 60


0


Northeast Asia


Source: FAO 2015a 74 South Asia 1990 2000


Southeast Asia


2010 Pacific 2015 Asia-Pacific


Model-based assessments suggest that forest cover in Asia and the Pacific between 2000 and 2030 will remain relatively stable due to effective protection and the introduction of certified forest management practices (Eitelberg et al. 2015). However, a high intensity of land systems in cropland, mosaic cropland and grassland used for food production is projected, especially in Australia, China and India (Figure 2.3.5).


Damage to coastal and marine ecosystems


Coastal ecosystems are of critical importance to countries and territories of Asia and the Pacific as they are areas of remarkable biological productivity and high accessibility. The existence of functional links between mangroves, seagrass beds, coral reefs and to some extent the open ocean means that degradation of one habitat type will adversely affect the health of neighboring ones.


Asia and the Pacific is home to approximately 45 per cent of the world’s coral reefs with the majority located along the coasts of Southeast Asia and western and central Pacific islands. Reefs, rivers, mangrove spawning grounds and other inshore fisheries, particularly those near urban areas and villages, have been dangerously overfished and degraded. For example, the sea cucumber, trochus, live coral, live reef fish and aquarium fish trades have increased, and fragile spawning aggregations of large finfish and seasonal migrations of smaller species have suffered, with 79 per cent of spawning aggregations reportedly in decline from the 1970s to the late 2000s (De Mitcheson et al. 2008). The effect has been a dramatic collapse of inshore fisheries, with a vast number of species at all trophic levels disappearing or becoming economically or ecologically extinct (SPREP 2014). The continuing harvesting of many populations of fish is mainly related to commercial fishing operations, in conjunction with an increase in fishing pressure from an ever-increasing human population. Oceanic mega-fauna populations are unlikely to be able to support the massively increasing fishing pressure to which they are currently subjected: more than 5 645 commercial vessels alone were actively fishing in the Pacific Ocean in 2011 (Harley et al. 2012).


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