WRI.org
By Frances Seymour
There’s good news and bad news for forests. Over the last 10 years, satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies have revolutionized our ability to monitor and understand the causes of forest loss.
The bad news is that deforestation data spanning the last two decades reveals a persistent hemorrhaging of the world’s most valuable terrestrial ecosystems — and we’re not doing enough to stop the bleeding.
What do trends in forest loss tell us?
Global tree cover loss trends show that in the 21st century, by far the most deforestation — meaning when forests are permanently converted to other land uses — is occurring in the tropics. We now have two decades of data on the loss of primary tropical forests, and it paints a sobering picture: stubbornly persistent annual losses hovering between 3 and 4 million hectares each year, punctuated by spikes associated with major fires.
The main direct cause of tropical forest loss is expansion of commercial agriculture, augmented in different regions to varying degree by clearing for small-scale agriculture, extractive activities, and roads and other infrastructure, with complex linkages among them. Even lockdowns associated with the coronavirus pandemic didn’t appear to disrupt those patterns in any consistent way; in fact, losses ticked up in 2020 compared to the previous year.
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