The revision of woodfuel estimates in FAOSTAT.

Adrian Whiteman is a Forestry Officer in the Forestry Planning and Statistics Branch, FAO Forestry Department, Rome. Jeremy Broadhead and Jamal Bahdon are consultants for the same unit. For over five decades, FAO has been collecting statistics on the production and trade of forest products and presenting this information annually in the FAO Forest Products Yearbook and on CDROM. These statistics, going back to 1961, are also available in FAO’s online statistical database, FAOSTAT (apps.fao.org), which is revised four times per year as new statistics are obtained from countries. These are the only forest products statistics that cover every major category of forest products and every country in the world. The woodfuel statistics in FAOSTAT have recently been revised based on an awareness that the method previously used to estimate missing data was probably leading to the presentation of misleading trends in woodfuel production for some countries and the world as a whole. This article briefly explains the need to revise these estimates and the methods used to do so, and shows how the revisions have altered the trends presented in FAOSTAT. Finally, it describes some of the problems that remain in interpreting these statistics.