Deforestation continued last year at a rate far exceeding promises to end the practice by 2030, according to a major study published Tuesday.
Forests nearly the size of Ireland were destroyed in 2023, with 6.37 million hectares (15.7 million acres) of trees felled and burned, according to two dozen research organizations, NGOs and advocacy groups.
This “significantly exceeds” what would put the world on track to eliminate deforestation by the end of the decade, a commitment made by more than 140 leaders in 2021.
Forests are home to 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial plant and animal species and are important for regulating the water cycle and sequestering CO2, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
“Globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegianni, a biodiversity and land use consultant at Climate Focus and lead author of the “Forest Depletion Assessment” report.
“We are only six years away from a key global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be cut down, degraded and burned at an alarming rate.”
In 2023, 3.7 million hectares of tropical primary forests – particularly carbon-rich and ecologically biodiverse environments – could disappear, a figure that must be significantly reduced to meet the 2030 objective.
slept and left
Among high-risk areas, researchers pointed to backsliding in Bolivia and Indonesia.~check~
The report said there has been an “alarming increase” in deforestation in Bolivia, increasing by 351 percent between 2015 and 2023.
“The trend shows no sign of slowing down,” it said, with forests being cleared on large scale for agriculture, particularly for soy but also beef and sugar.
In Indonesia, deforestation declined between 2020-2022, but began to increase sharply last year.
Ironically, this is partly due to lower demand for materials that are often considered eco-friendly, such as viscose for clothing, and increased nickel mining for electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy technologies.
A good news came from Brazil.
Although it remains the country with the highest deforestation rates in the world, it has made significant progress.
The situation has improved significantly in the Amazon, which has benefited from protective measures imposed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
However, in the Cerrado, a major tropical savanna below the Amazon, deforestation has increased.
desolate forest
The report also highlights the role of logging, road building and fires in forest degradation, when land is damaged but not completely destroyed.
In 2022, the last year data were available, a forest area twice the size of Germany was destroyed.
Erin Mattson, senior advisor at Climate Focus and co-author of the report, said “stronger policies and stronger enforcement” are needed.
“To meet global forest conservation goals, we must free forest conservation from political and economic whims,” he said.
The report comes in the wake of the European Commission’s proposal last week to postpone the implementation of its anti-deforestation law by a year (to the end of 2025), despite protests from NGOs.
“We have to fundamentally rethink our relationship with our models of consumption and production to move away from reliance on overexploitation of natural resources,” Mattson said.
(This story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is auto-generated from a syndicated feed.)
