Globally, 411 Million Hectares Forest Cut 2001-2020 (Half Area Of US) 26 Million Gone In 2020 Alone
On Tuesday, more than 100 countries signed on to an ambitious plan to halt deforestation by 2030 and pledged billions of dollars to the effort. Although world leaders lauded the move, climate activists say they’ve heard that promise before and that past efforts have come up short — the world is still losing massive numbers of trees each year. “Despite ambitious political commitments to end deforestation over the past decade, we are still losing tropical primary forests at an untenable rate,” said Crystal Davis, the director of the Global Forest Watch monitoring initiative. “We are running out of time to solve this problem.”
According to Global Forest Watch, the world lost 411 million hectares of forest between 2001 and 2020. That’s roughly half the size of the United States and equivalent to 10 percent of global tree cover. In 2020, the world lost a near-record 25.8 million hectares — almost double the amount in 2001.
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There have been global endeavors to combat deforestation in the past. In 2014, for instance, more than 200 governments, companies and civil society organizations signed the New York Declaration of Forests, which called for halving the rate deforestation by 2020 and halting it by 2030. But, Davis said, the world fell far short — “we blew through the 2020 targets that we set.” “It’s a mixture of lack of enforcement, lack of political will and the private sector not stepping up,” said Nathalie Walker, the director of tropical forest and agriculture at the National Wildlife Federation. “There has not been enough follow-through.”
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and arguably the most closely watched harbinger of deforestation. The rainforest is 17 percent deforested, and losses are especially pronounced in Brazil, which lost some 1.7 million hectares of rainforest in 2020 alone. “If you’re looking at the area cleared, Brazil is usually the worst,” Walker said. And of that, “cattle is the single biggest driver” of loss.
Walker notes that starting in the mid-2000s, the country saw about a decade of positive momentum on the issue. “There was a suite of public and private measures that was aiming to encourage production away from the forest frontier,” she said. But in recent years, that has been reversed. New research shows that last year, despite an economic recession, Brazil reported a 9 percent jump in its greenhouse gas emissions. “The principal factor,” the authors wrote, “was deforestation.” South America, however, is far from the only region experiencing deforestation. Of the 10 countries that have lost the most tree cover since 2001, only two of them — Brazil and Paraguay — are Amazonian.
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https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2021/11/03/world-has-pledged-stop-deforestation-before-trees-are-still-disappearing-an-untenable-rate/
