Deforestation and Climate Change
The Art - Deforestation and Climate Change
The Graph
What’s Alarming
Cutting trees adds greenhouse gases to the atmosphere while at the same time removing the ability of the trees to absorb existing existing carbon emissions.
“As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support billions of people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer. Yet the mass destruction of trees—deforestation—continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain.”
More than 100 world leaders have promised to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, in the COP26 2021 climate summit's first major deal.
“The tropics lost 10% more primary rainforest in 2022 than in 2021, according to new data from the University of Maryland and available on WRI’s Global Forest Watch platform.
Tropical primary forest loss in 2022 totaled 4.1 million hectares, the equivalent of losing 11 football (soccer) fields of forest per minute. All this forest loss produced 2.7 gigatonnes (Gt) of carbon dioxide emissions, equivalent to India's annual fossil fuel emissions.
This increased forest loss comes in the first year after heads of 145 countries vowed in the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use to halt and reverse forest loss by the end of the decade, recognizing the important role of forests in combating climate change and biodiversity loss. Instead of consistent declines in primary forest loss to meet that goal, the trend is moving in the wrong direction.”
World Resources Institute Global Forest Review – 2022, published June 2023
A report released on November 18, 2021 “…by Brazil’s National Institute of Space Research, or Inpe, showed that the world’s largest rainforest had lost an astounding 5,100 square miles of tree cover from August 2020 to July 2021…Satellite data indicated that deforestation increased by about 22 percent from the previous year. It was also the first time on record that the country has reported a fourth consecutive year of rising deforestation rates. Since Mr. Bolsonaro became president in 2019, the country has lost a forest area bigger than Belgium…” Amazon Deforestation Soars to 15-Year High, New York Times, Manuela Andreoni, Nov 20, 2021
Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Between 1990 and 2016, the world lost 502,000 square miles (1.3 million square kilometers) of forest, according to the World Bank—an area larger than South Africa. Since humans started cutting down forests, 46 percent of trees have been felled, according to a 2015 study in the journal Nature. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise. As the world is focused on the pandemic, an area of the Amazon 20 times the size of Manhattan was razed, a 55% increase over the same period in 2019.*
We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale, but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change. Tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed over the next decade to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to one estimate.” National Geographic, Climate 101- Deforestation
*New York Times” Spotlight on Virus, Razing of Amazon Only Worsens, Jun 7, 2020
“Destruction of the Amazon rainforest has accelerated in the past five years, with a much steeper increase in 2019. Between January and August 2019, total deforestation more than doubled compared to the same period a year prior, according to Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), as farmers, cattle owners, and others set fires to clear land. At the current rate, the Amazon will approach a "tipping point" of 20 to 25 percent of its total giving way to deforestation, at which point the rainforest can no longer generate enough rain to sustain itself. The rainforest is a vital global resource because of its role in storing carbon. Destroying it will cripple efforts to slow climate change.” https://www.piie.com/research/piie-charts/amazon-deforestation-fast-nearing-tipping-point-when-rainforest-cannot-sustain
“As fires rage across the Amazon, a growing number of scientists are raising the alarm about a nightmare scenario that could see much of the world’s largest rainforest erased from the earth. Climate change, along with the fires and other man-made forces, appear on the verge of triggering a significant change in the Amazon’s weather system. No one knows for sure whether and when this might happen, though some scientists who study the Amazon ecosystem call it imminent. If it does happen, a body of research suggests, the Amazon as a whole would cross a tipping point and begin to self-destruct — a process of self-perpetuating deforestation known as dieback. If that is left unchecked, half or more of the rainforest could erode into savanna, according to some estimates, and then the rainforest, which has long absorbed the world’s greenhouse gases, could instead begin to emit them.
The Amazon’s plant life stores an estimated 100 billion tons of carbon. By comparison, every coal plant worldwide combined emitted 15 billion tons of carbon in 2017. So even if only a small proportion of the trees destroyed by large-scale deforestation burn, this longtime buffer against climate change could instead become a driver of it. A continentwide transformation remains theoretical, and is still debated by scientists. But some believe that the Amazon could pass this tipping point soon, or may have already.
Asked for a best guess as to when the Amazon might cross that threshold, Thomas Lovejoy, a prominent environmental scientist, said that he and another scientist based in Brazil, Carlos Nobre, had independently arrived at the same estimate: 20 to 25 percent deforestation. The number was a “hip shot,” Dr. Lovejoy said. And deforestation alone would not set off the cycle, but was shorthand for a more complex set of drivers. The Brazilian government’s own estimate for deforestation of the Amazon stands at 19.3 percent, though some scientists consider this an undercount. ““It’s close,” Dr. Lovejoy said. “It’s really close.””**
**The Interpreter – “It’s Really Close’: How the amazon Rainforest Could Self-Destruct – Climate change and man-made fires could set off a cycle of self-perpetuating deforestation, scientists warn.” , By Max Fisher, Aug 30, 2019 The New York Times
