More than a year after nations pledged to end deforestation by 2030, the world continues to lose its tropical forests at a rapid pace, according to a report released Tuesday.
annual Survey by the World Resources Institute, a research organization, found that the world lost 10.2 million acres of primary rainforest in 2022, an increase of 10 percent from the previous year. It is the first assessment to cover a full year since November 2021, when 145 countries pledged at the global climate summit in Glasgow to halt forest loss by the end of this decade.
“We were now hoping to see a signal in the data that we are turning the corner on forest loss,” said Frances Seymour, a senior fellow with the institute’s Forestry Program. “We don’t see that signal yet, and in fact we’re heading in the wrong direction.”
The report, conducted in collaboration with the University of Maryland, documented tree loss in the tropics from deforestation, fires, and other causes. Last year’s destruction resulted in 2.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, a large amount roughly equal to the annual fossil fuel emissions of India, a country of 1.4 billion people.
Tropical deforestation also degrades some of the planet’s richest ecosystems, habitats for plants and animals, and regulators of rain patterns in many countries.
The Amazon rainforest, the largest in the world, has not faced such massive devastation in nearly two decades, according to World Resources Institute data analysis by Amazon Conservation, a research organization.
Brazil, the country with the largest portion of tropical rainforests, has one of the highest rates of deforestation globally. It accounted for more than 40 percent of tree losses globally, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia.
Bolivia provided some of the most surprising numbers in the report. Forest loss there rose 32 percent last year, the highest rate ever for the country. It was one of the few tropical forest nations not to sign the Glasgow Commitment on deforestation.
A strong driver of destruction in that country has been a government policy that encourages farmers to clear large tracts to secure land titles, said Marlene Quintanilla, director of research for Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, a nonprofit group in Bolivia.
“The permanent forest is not seen to perform any social or economic function,” she said.
The expansion of agriculture appears to be harming forests in Africa. In Ghana, the country that lost the largest proportion of its primary forests last year, small-scale deforestation for cocoa production was a major source of deforestation.
Deforestation is closely related to the lack of economic opportunities and basic infrastructure in the Congo River Basin region. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, most people do not have access to electricity, so the forest is an important source of firewood and charcoal for cooking.
Environmental harm reduction policies will not work on their own, said Teodil Nkwenchwa, who works on strategy and outreach for the World Resources Institute in the Congo Basin region.
“Unless we integrate development priorities into those actions in those countries, we will not be able to tackle deforestation,” he said.
One of the few bright spots in the report came from Southeast Asia, where efforts to reduce deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia continue to yield results. A moratorium on logging, efforts to restore peatlands, and corporate commitments to exclude palm oil suppliers associated with deforestation appear to be effective.
There are signs that the trajectory of global deforestation may change for the better in the near future.
This year, the European Union made a push in this direction, adopting a law It is forbidden to import a series of products that contribute to deforestation in tropical countries. China, the world’s largest importer of many agricultural commodities, has recently complied Crack down on illegal deforestation associated with its trade with Brazil.
Brazil also appears to be changing course. President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office in January pledging to protect the Amazon rainforest, preliminary figures for the first five months of the year show Deforestation rates there have fallen 31% since January. Deforestation and environmental crime increased sharply under his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro.
The report’s analysis focuses on the tropics because forest loss there is usually more permanent and tends to be due to human activity. Tropical forests also have a greater role in storing carbon and supporting biodiversity. But global tree cover loss outside the tropics fell 10 percent last year.
According to the report, the decline was a direct result of a decrease in wildfires in Russia’s boreal forests. But that could change. Canada On track to have the worst fire season registered.
El Niño, a weather pattern typically associated with more wildfires in the tropics, has arrived. There is concern that even if countries manage to reduce deforestation during this period, wildfires could wipe out some of their efforts.
“An El Niño year will be a test,” said Rod Taylor, global director of forests at the World Resources Institute, adding that he hoped the fires would not wreak havoc. “But we have to see.”
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