In the best case, a few governments -- in particular, European ones--can argue that their countries have managed to reverse the process and that they have more "forests" than before. However this hides two fundamentally important
facts. On the one hand, that the extension of their "forested area" refers in fact to monoculture tree plantations that
have little to do with their original forests. On the other hand, it hides an even more important fact that conservation of
its forests has been achieved at the expense of the forests of other countries, in particular those of the South.