Two-thirds of tropical rainforest destroyed or degraded globally, NGO
says
Send a link to a friend
[March 08, 2021]
By Jake Spring
BRASILIA (Reuters) - Humans have degraded
or destroyed roughly two-thirds of the world's original tropical
rainforest cover, new data reveals – raising alarm that a key natural
buffer against climate change is quickly vanishing.
The forest loss is also a major contributor of climate-warming
emissions, with the dense tropical forest vegetation representing the
largest living reservoir of carbon.
Logging and land conversion, mainly for agriculture, have wiped out 34%
of the world's original old-growth tropical rainforests, and degraded
another 30%, leaving them more vulnerable to fire and future
destruction, according to an analysis by the non-profit Rainforest
Foundation Norway.
More than half of the destruction since 2002 has been in South America's
Amazon and bordering rainforests.
As more rainforest is destroyed, there is more potential for climate
change, which in turn makes it more difficult for remaining forests to
survive, said the report's author Anders Krogh, a tropical forest
researcher.
"It's a terrifying cycle," Krogh said. The total lost between just 2002
and 2019 was larger than the area of France, he found.
The rate of loss in 2019 roughly matched the annual level of destruction
over the last 20 years, with a football-field's worth of forest
vanishing every 6 seconds, according to another recent report by the
World Resources Institute.
The Brazilian Amazon has been under intense pressure in recent decades,
as an agricultural boom has driven farmers and land speculators to torch
plots of land for soybeans, beef and other crops. That trend has
worsened since 2019, when right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro took
office and began weakening environmental enforcement.
But the Amazon also represents the best hope for preserving what
rainforest remains. The Amazon and its neighbors – the Orinoco and the
Andean rainforest – account for 73.5% of tropical forests still intact,
according to Krogh.
[to top of second column]
|
A tract of the Amazon jungle burns as it is cleared by loggers and
farmers in Porto Velho, Brazil August 24, 2019. REUTERS/Ueslei
Marcelino/File Photo
The new report "reinforces that Brazil must take care of the
forest," said Ane Alencar, a geographer with the Amazon
Environmental Research Institute who was not involved in the work.
"Brazil has the biggest chunk of tropical forest in the world and is
also losing the most."
Southeast Asian islands, mostly belonging to Indonesia, collectively
rank second in terms of forest destruction since 2002, with much of
those forests cleared for palm oil plantations.
Central Africa ranks third, with most of the destruction centered
around the Congo River basin, due to traditional and commercial
farming as well as logging.
Forests that were defined in the report as degraded had either been
partially destroyed, or destroyed and since replaced by secondary
forest growth, Rainforest Foundation Norway said.
That report's definition for intact forest may be overly strict,
cautioned Tasso Azevedo, coordinator of the Brazilian deforestation
mapping initiative MapBiomas. The analysis only counts untouched
regions of at least 500 square km (193 square miles) as intact,
leaving out smaller areas that may add to the world's virgin forest
cover, he said.
Krogh explained that this definition was chosen because smaller
tracts are at risk of the "edge effect," where trees die faster and
biodiversity is harder to maintain near the edge of the forest. A
forest spanning 500 square km can fully sustain its ecosystem, he
said.
(Reporting by Jake Spring; editing by Katy Daigle and Richard
Pullin)
[© 2021 Thomson Reuters. All rights
reserved.] Copyright 2021 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published,
broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.
Thompson Reuters is solely responsible for this content. |