Humans have degraded or destroyed about two-thirds of the world’s original tropical rainforest cover, new data revealed, 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 percent of the world’s original old-growth tropical rainforests, and degraded another 30 percent, leaving them more vulnerable to fire and future destruction, an analysis by the non-profit Rainforest Foundation Norway said.
Photo: AFP
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.”
The total lost from 2002 to 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 past 20 years, with a soccer 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 Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro took office and began weakening environmental enforcement.
However, 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 percent of tropical forests still intact, Krogh said.
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 might be overly strict, said Tasso Azevedo, coordinator of the Brazilian deforestation mapping initiative MapBiomas.
The analysis only counts untouched regions of at least 500km2 as intact, leaving out smaller areas that might add to the world’s virgin forest cover, he said.
Krogh said 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 500km2 can fully sustain its ecosystem, he said.
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Archeologists in Peru on Thursday said they found the 5,000-year-old remains of a noblewoman at the sacred city of Caral, revealing the important role played by women in the oldest center of civilization in the Americas. “What has been discovered corresponds to a woman who apparently had elevated status, an elite woman,” archeologist David Palomino said. The mummy was found in Aspero, a sacred site within the city of Caral that was a garbage dump for more than 30 years until becoming an archeological site in the 1990s. Palomino said the carefully preserved remains, dating to 3,000BC, contained skin, part of the
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to
Armed with 4,000 eggs and a truckload of sugar and cream, French pastry chefs on Wednesday completed a 121.8m-long strawberry cake that they have claimed is the world’s longest ever made. Youssef El Gatou brought together 20 chefs to make the 1.2 tonne masterpiece that took a week to complete and was set out on tables in an ice rink in the Paris suburb town of Argenteuil for residents to inspect. The effort overtook a 100.48m-long strawberry cake made in the Italian town of San Mauro Torinese in 2019. El Gatou’s cake also used 350kg of strawberries, 150kg of sugar and 415kg of
RSS