‘30 soccer pitches disappear every minute of every day’: tropical forest the size of England was destroyed in 2018
- ‘The world’s forests are now in the emergency room. The health of the planet is at stake and band aid responses are not enough,’ says conservation think tank
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Last year humanity destroyed an expanse of tropical forest nearly the size of England, the fourth largest decline since global satellite data become available in 2001, researchers reported Thursday.
The pace of the loss is the equivalent of 30 soccer pitches disappearing every minute of every day in 2018, or 120,000 sq km (46,000 square miles).
Almost a third of that area, some 36,000 sq km, was pristine primary rainforest, according to the annual assessment from scientists at Global Forest Watch, based at the University of Maryland.
“For the first time, we can distinguish tree cover loss within undisturbed natural rainforests, which contain trees that can be hundreds, even thousands, of years old,” said team manager Mikaela Weisse.
Despite a slew of countermeasures at both the national and international level, deforestation has continued largely unabated since the beginning of the century.
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Global forest loss peaked in 2016, fuelled in part by El Nino weather and fires in Brazil and Indonesia.
The main drivers are the livestock industry and large-scale commodity agriculture – palm oil in Asia and Africa, soy beans and biofuel crops in South America.
Small-scale commercial farming – of cocoa, for example – can also lead to the clearing of forests.
A quarter of tropical tree cover loss in 2018 occurred in Brazil, with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia each accounting for about 10 per cent.
Malaysia and Madagascar also saw high levels of deforestation last year.
Nearly a third of primary forest destruction took place in Brazil (13,500 sq km), with the Democratic Republic of Congo (4,800 sq km), Indonesia (3,400 sq km), Colombia (1,800 sq km) and Bolivia (1,500 sq km) rounding out the top five.
Madagascar lost 2 per cent of its entire rainforest in 2018.
“The world’s forests are now in the emergency room,” said Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at the World Resources Institute, an environmental policy think tank based in Washington DC. “The health of the planet is at stake, and band aid responses are not enough.”
One bright spot in the report was Indonesia, which lost 3,400 sq km of primary forest in 2018 – a 63 per cent drop compared to 2016.
In Brazil, however, trend queues are moving in the wrong direction.
“Our data shows a big spike in forest loss in 2016 and 2017 related to man-made fires,” Weisse said of Brazil. “Shockingly, we are also seeing invasions into indigenous lands that have been immune to deforestation for years.”
The researchers emphasised that Bolsonaro has not been in office long enough to assess the effects of his policies on deforestation.
In response to the report, Brazil’s foreign ministry said the Latin American country was “firmly committed to reconciling agricultural production and environmental preservation”.
In West Africa, meanwhile, 70 per cent of primary forest loss in Ghana and Ivory Coast occurred in protected areas, pointing up the need for stricter enforcement.
