Reforestation is one key to keeping nature in balance. Under the Sustainable Forestry Initiative (SFI) program, companies plant or grow more trees than are harvested each year. In fact, over ¼ of a billion acres are reforested in the USA and Canada each year under the SFISM program.
Thanks to hard work by the men and women working in our forests, we now have more forests today than we did on the very first Earth Day in 1970. Over 2 ½ billion trees are planted in the U.S. each year. The forest community plants over 1 ½ billion of these trees; that's an average of 4 million new trees planted every day by the forest community. Millions more trees regrow from seeds and sprout naturally.
Alpha Services has, since its inception, planted thousands of acres all over the United States. With an average of 60 to 70 thousand acres per year, Alpha Services has been a significant contributor to the reforestation cause.
Thanks to hard work by the men and women working in our forests, we now have more forests today than we did on the very first Earth Day in 1970. Over 2 ½ billion trees are planted in the U.S. each year. The forest community plants over 1 ½ billion of these trees; that's an average of 4 million new trees planted every day by the forest community. Millions more trees regrow from seeds and sprout naturally.
Alpha Services has, since its inception, planted thousands of acres all over the United States. With an average of 60 to 70 thousand acres per year, Alpha Services has been a significant contributor to the reforestation cause.
- Alpha Services plans to plant over 100,000 acres in 2015.
- The world’s forest cover amounts to 3.9 billion hectares (1 hectare equals approximately 2.5 acres).
- Two thirds of the world’s forests are located in ten countries: the Russian Federation, Brazil, Canada, the United States, China, Australia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, Angola and Peru.
- Forests cover about 30% of the world’s total land area. (A forest is considered an area with at least 10 per cent tree canopy cover.)
- 47% of the world’s forests are in the tropics, 33 per cent in the boreal zone (far north), 11 per cent in the temperate zones, and 9 per cent in sub-tropical areas.
- During the 1990s, the world lost about 14.6 million hectares of forest. Deforestation was slightly offset by new forest growth and the establishment of plantations, so that the net annual rate of forest loss for the decade amounted to 9.4 million hectares.
- The 94 million hectares of forest lost over the ten-year period, represented about 2 per cent of the world’s total forest cover, or an area larger than Venezuela.
- Most deforestation occurred in natural tropical forests, which lost 14.2 million hectares a year over the last decade. Africa and South America have suffered the most deforestation.
- Africa, which lost 5.3 million hectares of forest per year in the 1990's, was the region with the highest deforestation in the world.
- Forests are a major factor in the climate change issue. Forest ecosystems contain more than half of all terrestrial carbon, and account for about 80 per cent of the exchange of carbon between terrestrial ecosystems and the atmosphere. Deforestation in the 1980's may have accounted for a quarter of all human-induced carbon emissions, the second greatest emitter after fossil fuels.
- Only 2 % of the world’s forests, or 81 million hectares, are certified as being managed in a sustainable manner.