Last year, the planet lost 9.2 million acres of its tropical forest, an area a bit larger than the entire state of Maryland, according to new data from environmental group World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland. That’s like losing about 10 soccer fields of forest per minute — for an entire year.
Are rainforests doomed? Not necessarily.
In a grim new analysis of tropical forests, there are a few important glimmers of hope.
Benji Jones is an environmental correspondent at Vox, covering biodiversity loss and climate change. Before joining Vox, he was a senior energy reporter at Business Insider. Benji previously worked as a wildlife researcher.
Obviously, that sounds bad. It is bad.
For decades on end, the world has watched its rainforests disappear and give way to giant farms and cattle ranches that feed the public’s desire for meat and other food products. Roughly one-third of the world’s tropical forests are now gone. And that loss has fueled both the extinction crisis and climate change; the carbon stored in trees often gets released back into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide after they’re cut down, helping warm the planet.
Yet against this backdrop of destruction, there are a few different, more hopeful stories. The WRI analysis shows that, in a few regions, including Colombia and Brazil, deforestation declined dramatically last year or remained lower than it once was. In other words, more trees were left standing, compared to previous years. This is not only good news but it reveals something critical: With the right laws and good governance, countries can keep their tropical forests intact. Losing the planet’s rainforests is not inevitable.
Where forests were destroyed last year
The new analysis, based on an enormous amount of satellite imagery, found that the tropics lost slightly less forest in 2023, compared to 2022. You can see the recent dip in the chart below. It shows forest loss over the last two decades, nearly all of which is human-caused.
But the amount of destruction is still substantial, Mikaela Weisse, director of WRI’s Global Forest Watch project, said in a call with reporters last week. “The overall tropical rates of primary forest loss remained stubbornly consistent with past years,” Weisse said. “All of that forest loss resulted in 2.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions,” she added, which is equivalent to almost half of all the greenhouse gas emissions in the US.
The WRI analysis focuses on the tropics, because that is where the vast majority of global deforestation — the deliberate clearing of trees — takes place. Yet it also includes some broader statistics of global change, which show that there was a massive spike in forest loss worldwide last year compared to 2022 due to the record-breaking wildfires in Canada.
Just three countries account for the bulk of the recent destruction in the tropics: Brazil, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), and Bolivia. That’s partly because they’ve got a lot to lose. Brazil, for example, is home to nearly a third of the world’s tropical forests, whereas the lion’s share of the Congo Basin rainforest — the second largest in the world — is in DRC.
In most cases, topping the charts for destroying forests is as bad as it seems. In the DRC, for example, consistently high rates of forest loss are eroding the planet’s “last major carbon sink,” Elizabeth Goldman, a researcher at Global Forest Watch, said on the press call, “meaning that forest absorbs more carbon than it emits.” The problems here are especially challenging to solve. Many people clear patches of the forest with fire to grow food for their families, not to profit.
A troubling situation is also occurring in Bolivia, where deforestation continues to surge. 2023 was the country’s third year in a row of record-breaking destruction, the analysis found — part of a decade-long trend of increasing loss, fueled by agriculture. (Colonies of Mennonites, a religious group, are behind much of this recent deforestation.)
In Brazil and a handful of other countries, meanwhile, the high rate of forest loss masks what is actually a somewhat hopeful story.
Bucking the trend: Brazil, Colombia, Indonesia
Although Brazil lost nearly 3 million acres of tropical forest last year — much of which vanished from the Amazon — 2023 was actually a relatively good year. The country lost about a third less primary forest compared to 2022, a drop you can clearly see in the chart below, reaching the lowest level of loss since 2015.
It’s a tale of two presidents: Jair Bolsonaro and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, better known as Lula.
An icon of the left and a leader of Brazil’s Workers Party, Lula first governed between 2003 and 2011, a period that saw a massive drop in deforestation, at least partly due to his pro-environmental agenda. Then Bolsonaro came into power. The right-wing leader stripped enforcement measures, cut spending for science and environmental agencies, and fired environmental experts, among other activities largely in support of the agribusiness industry. Forests were flattened.
Now, Lula is back, after again winning office for a term that started early last year. He’s promised to curtail deforestation, including by stepping up enforcement and tracking criminal activity. And so far, it seems he’s having some success, according to WRI and the Brazilian government. “We have the opportunity again of being a champion on climate, and Lula has promised to do that,” Ana Paula Vargas, Brazil program director at Amazon Watch, an environmental advocacy group, told me last summer.
There’s more good news from Colombia, where destruction has similarly softened. Last year, the country’s rate of forest loss dropped in half, according to WRI, after several years of extreme deforestation — largely due to the region’s changing, complicated politics.
Finally, there’s Indonesia, where there’s also a reason to be hopeful. Home to one of the world’s most diverse and carbon-rich tropical forests, complete with orangutans and tigers and the world’s largest flower, forest loss in Indonesia remains well below its peak of forest loss in the early 2010s (although the country did see a spike in deforestation last year, per the WRI analysis).
For much of the last few decades, Indonesia has cleared forests to plant near rows of oil palm trees — the crops that produce palm oil, now among the most common oils worldwide. It’s used in everything from baby shampoo to ice cream. The industry has been incredibly destructive, to wildlife, local communities, and, really, the entire planet (the stability of which depends on keeping carbon in the ground).
But about 10 years ago, the story began to change. Environmental activists launched campaigns against the most harmful palm oil companies. Indonesia’s government put stricter policies in place. Groups like WRI and TheTreeMap, a data organization, started monitoring deforestation more closely from space, making destruction harder to hide. And as a result, the industry — though still far from perfect — started cleaning itself up.
“I don’t want to sit here and say that the palm oil industry has suddenly become shiny green and sustainable, but it’s mostly stopped deforestation,” Glenn Hurowitz, the founder and CEO of Mighty Earth, an environmental advocacy group, told me last year.
To be clear, countries like Brazil, Colombia, and Indonesia are still clearing their forests by the thousands of acres. It remains a problem that world leaders should not ignore. But the stories here also suggest that a different future for these ecosystems, among the most important in the world, is possible. Forests can be protected. Laws — and the enforcement of them — can root out harmful activities. Activism can actually transform an entire industry.
Yes, what’s happening in places like Brazil and Colombia is just a speck of hope in a world of destruction, but it’s an important reminder that the fate of the world’s tropical forests is in our control.
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