Vast tracts of pristine rainforest on three continents went up in smoke last year, with an area roughly the size of Switzerland cut down or burned to make way for cattle and commercial crops, researchers said yesterday.
Brazil accounted for more than one-third of the loss, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia a distant second and third, Global Forest Watch said in its annual report, based on satellite data.
The 38,000km2 destroyed last year — equivalent to a soccer field of old-growth trees every six seconds — made it the third-most devastating year for primary forests since the scientists began tracking their decline two decades ago.
“We are concerned that the rate of loss is so high, despite all the efforts of different countries and companies to reduce deforestation,” lead researcher Mikaela Weisse, Global Forest Watch project manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told reporters.
The total area of tropical forest leveled by fire and bulldozers worldwide last year was in fact three times higher — but virgin rainforests, as they were once known, are especially precious.
Undisturbed by modern development, they harbor the richest diversity of wildlife on Earth and keep huge stores of carbon locked in their woody mass.
When set ablaze, that carbon escapes into the atmosphere as planet-warming carbon dioxide.
“It will take decades or even centuries for these forests to get back to their original state” — assuming, of course, that the land they once covered is left undisturbed, Weisse said.
The forest fires that engulfed parts of Brazil last year made front-page news as the climate crisis loomed large in the public eye.
However, they were not the main cause of Brazil’s loss of primary forest, the data showed.
Satellite images revealed many new “hot spots” of forest destruction.
In the state of Para, for example, the fire-ravaged zones corresponded to reports of illegal land grabs inside the Trincheira/Bacaja indigenous reserve.
That was before Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro’s government proposed legislation that would relax restrictions within these nominally protected regions on commercial mining, oil and gas extraction, and large-scale agriculture — all of which could make such incursions even more common.
Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI, said this is not only unjust for the people who have lived in Brazil’s rainforests for uncounted generations, but also bad management.
“We know that deforestation is lower in indigenous territories,” she said. “A mounting body of evidence suggests that legal recognition of indigenous land rights provides greater forest protection.”
The COVID-19 pandemic could also make things worse, not just in Brazil — which has been hit especially hard by the novel coronavirus — but anywhere it saps the already anemic enforcement capacities of tropical forest nations.
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