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Numbers about Ethiopia's forest cover vary greatly, I see 4% in the year 2000 mentioned on Wikipedia, I see 14% in 2018 mentioned in this Bloomberg article and I see some numbers in between in a 2015 paper by Abraha Hatsey http://wiki.awf.forst.uni-goettingen.de/wiki/images/e/e9/6_3...

I wonder why the numbers are varying so wildly.

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If it was 4% I'm 2000, 14% in 2018, and in between in between, that doesn't suggest anything?

The numbers vary so much because they're (nearly) all fabricated by whomever was interviewed. The Ethiopian government is notoriously corrupt. Lots of talking heads who contribute little. They're just trying to one up each other with fabricated statistics.

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