Climate 101: Deforestation

As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change , preserve wildlife, and support more than eight billion 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 of fuel, and materials for manufacturing and construction.

We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb the carbon dioxide we exhale and 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.

There is also the imminent danger of disease caused by deforestation. An estimated 60 percent of emerging infectious diseases come from animals, and a major cause of viruses’ jump from wildlife to humans is habitat loss, often through deforestation.

But we can still save our forests. Aggressive efforts to rewild and reforest are already showing success. Tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to one estimate .

An iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice loss across the continent.

Causes of deforestation

Forests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Since 1990, the world has lost more than 420 million hectares or about a billion acres of forest, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations —mainly in Africa and South America. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise . The organization Amazon Conservation reports that destruction rose by 21 percent in 2020 , a loss the size of Israel.

Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation . Forestry practices, wildfires and, in small part, urbanization account for the rest. In Malaysia and Indonesia, forests are cut down to make way for producing palm oil , which can be found in everything from shampoo to saltine crackers. In the Amazon, cattle ranching and farms—particularly soy plantations—are key culprits .

Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also fell countless trees each year. Loggers, some of them acting illegally , also build roads to access more and more remote forests—which leads to further deforestation. Forests are also cut as a result of growing urban sprawl as land is developed for homes.

Not all deforestation is intentional. Some is caused by a combination of human and natural factors like wildfires and overgrazing, which may prevent the growth of young trees.

Why it matters

There are some 250 million people who live in forest and savannah areas and depend on them for subsistence and income—many of them among the world’s rural poor.

Eighty percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests , and deforestation threatens species including the orangutan , Sumatran tiger , and many species of birds. Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day and retains heat at night. That disruption leads to more extreme temperature swings that can be harmful to plants and animals.

With wild habitats destroyed and human life ever expanding, the line between animal and human areas blurs, opening the door to zoonotic diseases . In 2014, for example, the Ebola virus killed over 11,000 people in West Africa after fruit bats transmitted the disease to a toddler who was playing near trees where bats were roosting.

( How deforestation is leading to more infectious diseases in humans .)

Some scientists believe there could be as many as 1.7 million currently “undiscovered” viruses in mammals and birds, of which up to 827,000 could have the ability to infect people, according to a 2018 study .

Deforestation’s effects reach far beyond the people and animals where trees are cut. The South American rainforest, for example, influences regional and perhaps even global water cycles, and it's key to the water supply in Brazilian cities and neighboring countries. The Amazon actually helps furnish water to some of the soy farmers and beef ranchers who are clearing the forest. The loss of clean water and biodiversity from all forests could have many other effects we can’t foresee, touching even your morning cup of coffee .

In terms of climate change, cutting trees both adds carbon dioxide to the air and removes the ability to absorb existing carbon dioxide. If tropical deforestation were a country, according to the World Resources Institute , it would rank third in carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions, behind China and the U.S.

What can be done

The numbers are grim, but many conservationists see reasons for hope . A movement is under way to preserve existing forest ecosystems and restore lost tree cover by first reforesting (replanting trees) and ultimately rewilding (a more comprehensive mission to restore entire ecosystems).

( Which nation could be the first to be rewilded ?)

Organizations and activists are working to fight illegal mining and logging—National Geographic Explorer Topher White, for example, has come up with a way to use recycled cell phones to monitor for chainsaws . In Tanzania, the residents of Kokota have planted more than 2 million trees on their small island over a decade, aiming to repair previous damage. And in Brazil, conservationists are rallying in the face of ominous signals that the government may roll back forest protections.

( Which tree planting projects should you support ?)

Stopping deforestation before it reaches a critical point will play a key role in avoiding the next zoonotic pandemic. A November 2022 study showed that when bats struggle to find suitable habitat, they travel closer to human communities where diseases are more likely to spillover. Inversely, when bats’ native habitats were left intact, they stayed away from humans. This research is the first to show how we can predict and avoid spillovers through monitoring and maintaining wildlife habitats.

For consumers, it makes sense to examine the products and meats you buy, looking for sustainably produced sources when you can. Nonprofit groups such as the Forest Stewardship Council and the Rainforest Alliance certify products they consider sustainable, while the World Wildlife Fund has a palm oil scorecard for consumer brands.

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How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

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Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences.

Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity.

“Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.”

But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution.

“Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.”

Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “ The Economics of Tropical Deforestation ,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics . The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess.

So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem.

Replacing forests with farms

Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place.

But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common.

Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards.

All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents.

“Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why?

The search for solutions

As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting.

Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted.

“There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?”

Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing.

At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions. 

Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.”

Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade. 

Politics and pulp

Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles.

For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.”

Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016.

How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support.

“The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.”

Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play.

“To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.”

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These are the 10 key actions needed to save the Amazon rainforest, scientists say 

An aerial view shows a deforested plot of the Amazon near Porto Velho, Rondonia State, Brazil

Experts warn the Amazon is approaching a dangerous tipping point. Image:  REUTERS/Ueslei Marcelino

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} Victoria Masterson

solution to problem of deforestation

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A hand holding a looking glass by a lake

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Stay up to date:, climate change.

  • Scientists have drawn up an action plan to save the Amazon rainforest, river system, and region.
  • It includes respecting the Amazon’s 400-plus indigenous communities and exposing companies or product lines that threaten the viability of the region.
  • The initiative is convened by the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network.

The Amazon rainforest is a mega-diverse ecosystem that is home to 35 million people and 1 in 10 of Earth’s known species .

But its survival hangs in the balance. Deforestation and climate change have seen the Amazon rainforest lose a fifth of its forest cover in 50 years.

Experts warn the region is approaching a dangerous tipping point , where vast areas of forest will be reduced to open grassland.

Now scientists have set out 10 key ways to save the Amazon rainforest and river system.

The Amazon We Want

Called The Amazon We Want , the recommendations are based on a detailed scientific assessment of the state of the Amazon. They prioritize the long-term wellbeing of the region’s ecosystem and people.

Scientists from the region and those who study it drew up the recommendations after forming the Science Panel for the Amazon. This is convened by the United Nations Sustainable Development Solutions Network (SDSN), which mobilizes global scientific and technological expertise to promote practical solutions for sustainable development.

Have you read?

This challenge aims to protect and restore the amazon, african rainforests slow climate change despite record heat and droughts, costa rica has doubled its tropical rainforests in just a few decades. here’s how.

Here is a summary of the 10 recommendations.

1. The sovereignty of the Amazon is untouchable

The countries of the Amazon region have sovereign rights over their territories and natural resources. These are legal rights that can’t be challenged by nations outside the Amazon. The eight countries of the Amazon are Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

2. The rights of the inhabitants of the Amazon are a priority

Any sustainable development in the Amazon must respect the dignity and rights of its people, the scientists say. Around 35 million people live in the region. This includes more than 400 indigenous and traditional communities who speak more than 300 languages.

3. Saving the Amazon is a global commitment

Amazonian countries must develop and implement a plan to save the Amazon – and countries around the world must support this. As consumers of products from deforested areas, the most developed countries have a particular responsibility.

4. Science-based solutions

The recommendations of scientists researching the Amazon – and especially those from the Amazonian countries – will inform the Amazon’s sustainable development. These will also be based on “sound scientific principles”. Innovation must explore options including developing the forest economy and protecting freshwater fisheries.

5. The indigenous peoples are the guardians of the Amazon forest

People native to the region have managed the Amazon forest for thousands of years, says the Science Panel for the Amazon. Their rights and traditional knowledge and practices must be respected and prioritized.

6. Real-time monitoring

Satellites and other data tools are critical in the real-time monitoring of deforestation, forest fires and other threats to the Amazon. Data collected on location is also crucial in backing this up. The scientific community must collaborate to implement an early warning system that alerts the world to risks in “near real time”.

7. A sustainable and efficient economy for an Amazon with a future

Private organizations can’t take part in commercial activities that threaten the survival of the Amazon forest and its people. Agriculture, mining and hydropower must be kept within authorized areas and based on clear science. Improving degraded areas by adopting technology and best practices should be prioritized.

8. Responsibility for sustainable production

Products from the Amazon must be produced sustainably. All companies trading or using products originating from the Amazon are responsible for this – including investment funds and banks. If any companies or product lines threaten the viability of the Amazon rainforest, consumers should have access to all information on this. Where there have been illegal activities, certification measures and sustainable practices should be adopted at scale.

9. Urgent forest restoration

Forest restoration plans set out by the Amazonian countries must be prioritized. “Immediate, active, and ambitious reforestation” can lessen the risk of forest areas being turned into tropical savannas (grasslands), the scientists say. “This is particularly true in deforested regions, which are largely abandoned cattle ranches and farmland, and account for around 23% of destroyed forest land,” they add.

10. Leveraging/harnessing new technologies

Advanced science and technologies can save the tropical forest and the Amazon’s ecosystems, peoples and communities. New technologies and high-value bio-industries can be leveraged. These include pharmaceuticals, food, cosmetics, new materials and nutraceuticals – products with health benefits that are derived from food sources, such as nutritional supplements. These must be strictly managed within clear and firm ecological limits.

UpLink is a digital platform to crowdsource innovations in an effort to address the world’s most pressing challenges.

It is an open platform designed to engage anyone who wants to offer a contribution for the global public good. The core objective is to link up the best innovators to networks of decision-makers, who can implement the change needed for the next decade. As a global platform, UpLink serves to aggregate and guide ideas and impactful activities, and make connections to scale-up impact.

Hosted by the World Economic Forum, UpLink is being designed and developed in collaboration with Salesforce, Deloitte and LinkedIn.

Innovative solutions

The World Economic Forum is calling for innovative bioeconomy projects in the Amazon rainforest that protect and restore its biodiversity and ecosystem.

The Trillion Trees: Amazon Bioeconomy Challenge is part of 1t.org , the Forum’s global reforestation initiative. This aims to conserve, restore and grow one trillion trees by 2030.

The challenge is hosted on UpLink , a digital platform launched by the Forum and its partners to crowdsource innovative solutions to the world’s biggest problems.

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World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

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15 Strategies How to Reduce and Prevent Deforestation

solution to problem of deforestation

Forests are one of the most important ecosystems on Earth. 80 percent of all terrestrial plants, insects, and animals call forests home. Nearly one third of people in the world depend directly on forests for their livelihoods [1] .

Trees help regulate the climate, filter water through their root system, capture dust particles and pollutants from the air and stabilize soils against erosion. They perform these vital services equally for everyone without taking into account country boundaries or the size of your income.

Every day, we use resources that forests provide to us, such as timber, firewood, medicinal and edible plants. Yet if we continue to lose our forests at the current rate, in 80 years from now there will be no forest left on our “green” planet [2] .

Deforestation is happening everywhere on the planet for many different reasons that vary from region to region. Vast areas of rainforests in a number of tropical countries, including Indonesia, Brazil, and Malaysia, have been destroyed to make way for palm oil, soy plantations and cattle ranches. The increasing global demand for wood products threatens many ancient forests around the world, whether it is for paper products, furniture or fuel.

Ending deforestation is the best chance we have to stabilize our climate, save wildlife species and protect our well-being. Protecting the forest is our mutual responsibility, no matter how far away we live from the nearest one. Adopt some of these strategies to help prevent the loss of more trees.

The death of the forest is the end of our life. — Dorothy Stang

What can we do about deforestation?

#1 plant a tree.

The most straightforward personal strategy to fight against deforestation is to plant a tree. Planting a tree could be considered a lifelong investment into the environment and your good mental health.

The cutting down of trees causes billions of tons of carbon dioxide (a greenhouse gas) to be released into the air. By planting trees, you are helping to combat global warming because trees absorb carbon dioxide. You are also helping to reduce run off water from the hills. Tree roots prevent landslides and rock slides that sometimes can harm animals, people or damage buildings. Planting and caring for trees is essential for the overall health and quality of life of the community.

Trees are known for their mind soothing and healing properties. Just walking through a forest and looking at the trees calms our mind, alleviates worries and helps tired eyes recover from strain.

You can start by planting one tree, or two, or you can even plant a whole forest .

Have you heard the story of Jadav Payeng from Majuli Island, India?

The ‘Forest Man of India,’ as Jadav was titled by the country’s former president, has planted a whole forest with his own hands – one tree a day for over 40 years. The resulting 1,400 acres of forest inhabited by rhinos, tigers and elephants are astonishing. Trees also protect the island community from seasonal flooding and land erosion. So, this man has created a whole ecosystem from scratch, sustaining many lives through his consistent effort.

Watch his full story in this video.

Jadav’s story is inspiring, but it’s good to know that he is not the only one . For example, Antonio Vincente has replanted 50,000 trees on his 77 acres of land in the Amazon rainforest. Similarly, Nkomo Sikenala is striving to encourage families in Malawi to plant trees around their houses by providing them tree seedlings at reduced cost.

Join these inspiring people and start writing your own story of a life-giver. Plant a tree today.

#2 Use less paper

Two million trees are cut every day just to supply the paper demand of the United States.

Globally, 40 percent of all timber is used to make paper products, and the demand for paper increases by two to three percent every year [3] . This means that the paper industry is still consuming more and more trees.

Since the industry has such a high need for wood, it should come as no surprise that some part of the timber originates from illegal logging .

By printing out every email and wasting paper, you are unwittingly spinning the wheel of illegal forest destruction. Reduce your paper use when you can. This way, you will decrease your contribution to the loss of forests.

#3 Recycle paper and cardboard

Did you know that one ton (2,000 pounds) of paper put to recycle prevents the cutting of 17 trees? These 17 trees then sequester around 250 pounds of carbon dioxide from the air every single year [10] .

If just 10 percent of all the paper used by the average American in one year were recycled, 25 million trees would be saved [11] . That makes 367 million pounds of carbon dioxide absorbed by these trees in one year.

Imagine how many trees you can save and how much good they perform for the quality of our lives by recycling all your paper.

#4 Use recycled products

You may have noticed a little label “made from recycled paper” on your new notebook. The same label can be found on many other daily use items like books, paper bags, egg packaging and even toilet paper.

By choosing items made from recycled paper, you make a conscious effort to lower the demand for more timber .

Besides decreasing the need to cut more trees, your purchase is also supporting paper recycling facilities and reducing the amount of waste entering landfills. Therefore, try to purchase your next notebook made from recycled paper and the environment will be very thankful.

The same rule goes for furniture shopping. When buying a new piece of furniture, try to look first for already used pieces. You can often find real treasures for almost no cost. All they need is just a little bit of refurbishing. But this way you can obtain truly unique and personalized pieces for your interior.

For example, the wooden table on which my computer rests when writing this article is bought from a lady who had used it in her office for over 30 years. Few months ago, it has become a centrepiece of our Greentumble office and will remain so for many more years to come 😊.

#5 Buy only sustainable wood products

As a consumer, you can help reduce the demand for more logging (especially illegal logging) by ensuring that you only purchase products which are certified by the Forest Stewardship Council (FSC) . The FSC is currently the best global standard in forest management, and provides a system for interested parties to work towards responsible forest management.

By purchasing FSC certified products, you are doing two important things:

  • You are ensuring that you aren’t supporting unsustainable or illegal logging,
  • You are also supporting companies who strive to produce wood sustainably and respect the rights of their workers and indigenous peoples.

#6 Don’t buy products containing palm oil

While a small amount of palm oil may be sustainably produced, the majority comes from recently cleared land. Palm oil production has become one of the main causes of tropical rainforest destruction around the world today.

Did you know that palm oil is found in many of the products you buy from the supermarket?

A large percentage of the world’s palm oil production comes from Indonesia and Malaysia, where the virgin rainforest is being cleared at an alarming rate of 2.4 million acres a year to make way for new plantations.

Avoiding products containing palm oil might not be easy, because it can be disguised in many different forms in numerous beauty products and food. If you cannot drop some of your favorite products with palm oil entirely, look at least for an alternative that carries a sustainable palm oil certification.

To date, the most rigorous certification process comes from the Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil (RSPO) , where at least 95% of the palm oil is certified in sustainable practices throughout the supply chain [5] .

#7 Reduce meat consumption

To produce the same amount of protein from animal agriculture requires much larger areas of land compared to plant-based farming. For example, nearly one third of the ice-free surface of the planet is converted into pasture for our domestic animals and 30 percent of available arable land is used to grow livestock feed rather than food for our direct consumption [6] .

The global demand for meat keeps constantly rising, but our space to rear livestock does not. That is why animal farming has become one of the leading causes of deforestation in Amazon. Around 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest clearing is done to make way for cattle ranches [7] .

If you choose to reduce the amount of meat you eat, you will lower the global demand for meat and help prevent further destruction of forests to make way for more livestock. Start slowly by replacing one portion of animal protein a week with a plant-based protein like beans.

After all, periods of not eating meat have been practiced by our ancestors for thousands of years – be it because of the meat shortage or religious fasting. In a traditional perception, periods of no meat eating have always been connected with the complete purification of the organism.

#8 Do not burn firewood excessively

More than two billion people around the world rely only on firewood to cook and heat their homes [9] . Unfortunately, this often happens in poor areas where already vulnerable forests near villages and towns are cut for fuel well before they can regenerate. Such mismanagement slowly leads to their total disappearance.

For example: The Batán Grande forest in Lambayeque on the north coast of Peru has been declared a nature reserve. One of the key species of the reserve is a tree called mesquite. But despite being protected, more than 2,000 ha of mesquite woodlands are lost every year due to poverty of local people, who fell the trees and burn them at home anyway [8] .

Global forests suffer already a great deal of damage from our excessive consumption, when you want to make a fire in your fireplace, make sure you burn wood from sustainably managed forests that have enough time to naturally regenerate.

#9 Practice eco-forestry

Eco-forestry is a restorative method of forest management, which is not based on economic productivity. In this practice, certain trees are selectively harvested while causing minimal damage to the rest of the forest.

The long-term aim of this method is to systematically fell mature trees, while leaving the forest ecosystem relatively unaffected.

If you own a piece of forest, follow these principles for they will pay you back in the long run more than the profit focused short-term forestry.

# 10 Raise awareness

Major environmental problems such as deforestation often continue to occur because of a lack of awareness and knowledge about the problem.

By educating people about the effects of their actions, such as palm oil consumption, the amount of deforestation can be reduced. Tell your friends and family about steps they can take to reduce global deforestation or show them this article 😊.

Better awareness and education is important even in the case of farmers. Education of local farmers about optimizing their land management will ensure that less forested areas need to be cleared for farming. After all, farmers are the stewards of our lands.

#11 Respect the rights of indigenous people

Although this isn’t an issue which is well publicized or widely realized, deforestation destroys the lives of millions of indigenous people. In many remote areas, large international corporations under the cover of corrupt governments intentionally violate the rights of local communities.

The best example of such a mistreatment and disrespect are happening in the Amazon with cattle ranching, or in southeast Asia with the spread of palm oil plantations, resulting often in conflicts and even physical attacks against native people.

But when indigenous people are given equal rights and their traditional lands are respected, the incidence of (illegal) deforestation decreases, as they are able to legally fight for protection of their forests.

For example, Greenpeace published an article about the Cree Nation of Waswanipi land fighting against the large-scale exploitation of the boreal forest in Quebec, Canada. Despite facing enormous pressure from logging companies, the Cree have so far stood their ground and made sure that their pristine forests and cultural heritage remains untouched for future generations.

Respect the rights of indigenous people, help them gain the equal rights and support them when you can.

#12 Support organizations that fight deforestation

Numerous international and locally-focused organizations strive to protect forests from deforestation and apply sustainable forestry practices. Examples of some you may have heard of are:

  • World Wildlife Fund
  • Rainforest Action Network
  • Rainforest Alliance
  • Conservation International
  • Amazon Watch
  • Arbor Day Foundation and many more.

 You can support their efforts by visiting their websites, making donations, or perhaps even participating in their volunteering programs.

#13 Join a community forestry project

In 2016, tens of thousands of people in Bhutan have planted 108,000 trees in honor of the birth of the country’s new prince. What a wonderful gift to the future ruler, right?

But the message the country has sent to the world had a deeper meaning. Through this act, Bhutan has demonstrated the indispensable power of community in managing natural resources. And community forestry is based exactly on that!

Community forestry is carried out by local residents, volunteers, and schools with the support of the government. This forestry technique involves tree planting, timber harvesting, cleaning, and forest conservation. Through the active involvement in the management of forests, local people become much more aware of all the benefits intact forests provide for them on a daily basis.

Let’s look back at Bhutan’s example. According to FAO report , 1,664 rural households take care of nearly 3,000 hectares of community forests. Since the program was adopted in 2000, it has improved livelihoods of participating rural communities by:

  • strengthening their social bonds,
  • regenerating degraded lands,
  • purifying and securing water supply,
  • providing communities with cheap and local source of fuel.

 If you have a chance and time, join a local community forestry project. You may get far more benefits from simply being outdoors with trees and soil than you could ever get from online messaging with your friends.

#14 Help restore degraded forests

Restoration of degraded forests is a challenging task that takes decades, and requires careful planning and monitoring. It is not easy, but it is necessary if we do not want to lose all our forests. What is wonderful about forest restoration is the ecosystem’s capacity to perfectly recover and give us a new chance to start once again.

For example: In just 50 years a part of a long lost tropical rainforest in Costa Rica was successfully revived [12] . Similarly successful was South Korea’s reforestation program that has managed to nearly double the country’s forest cover from 35 to 64 percent since 1950s [13] .

Non-profit organizations such as The Sierra Club are working throughout the world to restore degraded forests and return them to their former glory. While this doesn’t reduce deforestation directly, it can offset many negative impacts of deforestation on a global scale. Look for such organizations in your area or in the area of your interest and support their activities if you can.

Their work of reversing deforestation is precious for future generations.

#15 Fight governmental corruption

Corrupt governments are often payed off by illegal logging companies to ignore their activities. Do not support corrupt politicians and systems. Reduction of corruption will go a long way towards reducing deforestation overall.

In many poorer countries, the lack of police presence and law enforcement means that illegal deforestation often goes unpunished and unnoticed for many years, even though it is destroying the country’s economy and resource wealth.

For example: 70 percent of Indonesia’s timber exports come from illegal logging. Besides leaving behind extensive damage to the rainforest, the country is also losing around US$3.7 billion every year in lost revenue [15] . Thus, the illegal logging does more harm than good to the country.

Report illegal logging

Did you know that in some countries are available mobile applications for people like you and me to verify and report illegal logging?

For example, Romania has launched an app called “Inspectorul Padurii.” The app enables users to enter a registration number of a logging truck to check if the vehicle has official permission to carry wood. If the number is not in the database, the load is illegal and the user should notify the police.

Global Forest Watch has developed an app called the Forest Watcher , which monitors areas with intact and protected forests. The app notifies you about the closest forest clearing and allows you to even directly upload pictures of deforested areas you encounter. In Uganda, the app is used by rangers and private forest owners to detect illegal logging and serves as an evidence during offenders’ prosecution.

If you want to help protect forests in your country, give a try to the Forest Watcher or check on internet if you cannot find a similar app developed directly for your area. The use of the modern technology and gadgets could be a possible solution of illegal logging which is one way to limit deforestation.

Where is deforestation happening?

To certain extent, deforestation happens everywhere in the world and has been happening even throughout our history. Within the limits of sustainability, forests have incredible capacity to recover and can be logged for centuries without getting damaged.

The problem comes when our consumption exceeds the natural ability of forests to regenerate, and when we start to overexploit this resource on a large-scale. Unfortunately, this is exactly what is currently happening in many tropical countries that are homes to unique rainforests .

According to a 2017 study of the world’s deforestation hot spots, Brazil, Indonesia and Democratic Republic of Congo are countries with the highest absolute forest loss in the world.

In Brazil, forests are cleared to make space for agriculture. In Indonesia it is for the palm oil and paper industry. And in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the main reason is extensive tree felling for fuel and farm land around rapidly growing cities.

But we do not have to go deep into the lush rainforest to witness sad effects of deforestation. Greentumble has written even about the spread of illegal deforestation in Romania due to the corrupt government, or total destruction of forests in Ukraine for the amber mining , and reported on the scale of deforestation in the United States as well.

What is being done about deforestation?

Through the amendment of the Lacey Act in May 2008, the United States became the first country to ban the import and sale of illegally-sourced wood.

According to the Illegal Logging Portal, the implementation of this legislation has delivered some positive results. Firstly, in assuring consumers that products they buy are legally sourced (although this does not necessarily mean, they come from sustainably managed forests). Secondly, by closing down a large market for illegal loggers, and therefore restricting their chances of making profit [16] .

The European Union has implemented a similar law called Forest Law Enforcement, Governance and Trade. Besides banning the import of illegal timber to the EU, this program also strives to help the Government of Indonesia to tackle the illegal logging on their territory [17] .

Australia has jumped on the bandwagon when the country introduced the Illegal Logging Prohibition Bill in 2011, shrinking even more the market for illegally sourced wood, and thus lowering the damaging deforestation throughout the world [18] .

But despite these efforts, tackling the deforestation globally will require much more initiative and international cooperation of governments, corporations and even consumers like you and me.

So, this brings up a question: how can we control deforestation then?

According to the Nature Conservancy , a promotion of sustainable forest management takes place on four important levels:

  • Governments: Governments must enforce incentives to support legal and sustainable forest management and trade system.
  • Land owners and managers: Forest owners must follow the legal principles of the sustainable forest management.
  • Corporations and investors: Corporations must verify and buy only legally and sustainably sourced timber. Their investments have the ability to revert forest destruction and encourage sustainable forestry in developing countries through the establishment of long-term cooperation with forest owners.
  • Consumers: Consumers must make responsible choices when buying products. By picking only sustainably produced items, you are pushing corporations to put emphasis on the sustainable sourcing of their products.

As you can see, the way to tackle deforestation is complex and intertwined through the daily actions of all of us. No matter what your profession is or how far you live from the forest, every decision you make affects how many trees will be lost next year in the world’s tropical rainforests or vast boreal forests of the north.

Be aware of the footprint you are leaving behind your lifestyle, for animals on the edge of extinction like Orangutans or Sumatran tigers are losing their forest home every minute now.

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About greentumble.

Greentumble was founded in the summer of 2015 by us, Sara and Ovi . We are a couple of environmentalists who seek inspiration for life in simple values based on our love for nature. Our goal is to inspire people to change their attitudes and behaviors toward a more sustainable life. Read more about us .

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Why Tropical Forests Are Being Lost, and How to Protect Them

By Frances Seymour

What do trends in forest loss tell us?

New narratives, new leadership could accelerate action on deforestation, 4 ways to end deforestation by 2030, what does the future hold for tropical forests.

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There’s good news and bad news for forests. The good news is that forests are high on the international agenda: A plethora of initiatives are underway to follow through on existing commitments to halt and reverse forest loss in the interest of climate mitigation. Those actions are being complemented with reaffirmations of forests’ importance to biodiversity.

The bad news is that deforestation data spanning the last two decades reveals that efforts to slow a persistent hemorrhaging of the world’s most valuable terrestrial ecosystems are not yet sufficient to stop the bleeding.

Over the last decade, satellite imagery and other remote sensing technologies have revolutionized our ability to monitor and understand the causes of forest loss.

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 more than two decades of data on the loss of primary tropical forests, and it paints a sobering picture: Stubbornly persistent annual losses hovering around 3 to 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 degrees 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. Similarly, effects on forests of the abrupt shifts in global supply chains for energy and food prompted by the war in Ukraine are not immediately discernable in the 2022 data.

An especially worrisome signal in recent data is that forest loss globally is increasingly driven by climate change through increased exposure to droughts, fires, storms and pest outbreaks. In 2022, a newly available data set enabled us to distinguish between fire-related losses and other causes of forest loss. It confirms an upward trajectory for both the absolute area and percentage share of forest loss that can be attributed to burning across many countries in tropical, temperate and boreal latitudes. This highlights the trend that forest loss from fires continues to be exacerbated by the hotter, drier conditions caused by global climate change, as well as directly by the effects of forest loss and degradation itself on local temperature and rainfall.

In 2020 , Bolivia moved up into third place on the list of the countries losing the most rainforest due to extensive wildfires following a drought. In the same year, forests covering some 30% of the world’s largest tropical wetland — the Pantanal in Brazil — burned. In 2021 and 2022 , fires kept Bolivia in third place, and nudged the losses of second place Democratic Republic of the Congo up to and exceeding half a million hectares.

Such loss is tragic on multiple levels. Tropical rainforests are especially valuable for meeting global objectives: Their vegetation and soils sequester vast amounts of carbon, and they harbor a disproportionate share of the world’s plant and animal species.

Forests also play important, if hidden, roles in stabilizing the climate at global, regional and local scales in ways other than via their role in the global carbon cycle. Scientists are increasingly recognizing the special role of tropical forests in regulating the global climate system, for example:

  • At the global scale, the biophysical effects of tropical deforestation — such as decreases in evapotranspiration, surface roughness and albedo from cloud cover — significantly amplify the global warming effects of released CO2 alone.
  • At the regional scale, rainforests in the Amazon and Congo Basin have been shown to generate rainfall in addition to their roles in regulating surface water flows. Deforestation can disrupt precipitation patterns important for agricultural production, hydroelectric power generation and municipal water supplies.
  • At the local scale, tropical forests moderate average and extreme temperatures, meaning deforestation can increase exposure to heat stress affecting agricultural workers and the crops and livestock they tend.

And forests are essential for the well-being of some of the world’s most vulnerable Indigenous and local communities, whose livelihoods and cultural integrity are threatened by forest loss. In a profound irony, although Indigenous Peoples are now recognized as among the world’s most effective forest stewards, they are also well represented among the hundreds of environmental defenders whose lives are being lost every year to violent conflict over natural resources.

However, it doesn’t have to be this way. Many of the causes of forest loss are amenable to change in the near-term.

For example, a large proportion of forest loss is illegal — such as forest clearing within the boundaries of protected areas in Colombia and recognized Indigenous territories in Brazil — and could be addressed through increased law enforcement. Many of the commodities fattened or cultivated at the expense of forests — led by beef, oil palm, soy, cocoa, plantation rubber, coffee and plantation wood fiber — as well as illegally logged timber are globally traded and thus subject to pressures from government regulation and consumer preferences.

Indeed, two of the most interesting deviations from the relatively consistent patterns of forest loss across the tropics are those from Brazil and Indonesia, which both illustrate the effectiveness of government policy and corporate restraint.

In Brazil, an impressive decade-long reduction in high rates of deforestation after 2004 is attributable to a suite of public policy measures and private actions under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s (known as Lula) first administration, but that success unraveled due to policy reversals under subsequent administrations. In 2022 , the last year of the administration under President Jair Bolsonaro, forest clearing unrelated to fires continued on an accelerated upward trajectory — and for the past five years it has exceeded lower levels that were maintained from 2007 to 2015. Lula’s re-election has inspired hope among domestic and international constituencies alike that forest loss in Brazil can once again be tamed.

Conversely, Indonesia’s rate of forest loss was on a steady upward trajectory in the early years of this century until experiencing a steep and continuing decline following government and corporate responses to catastrophic fires in 2015. Since then, Indonesia chalked up several years in row of successful efforts to reduce deforestation, and forest loss in 2022 remains near record lows. With President Joko Widodo (known as Jokowi) nearing the end of his second term, the resilience of Indonesia’s achievements through a transition to new leadership will be a story to watch in the coming years.

Tropical tree cover loss, 2001-2022

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Experience in addressing the causes of deforestation in both Brazil and Indonesia are relevant to the current situation in Bolivia, which hosts the world’s seventh largest area of remaining primary tropical forest but has not received a commensurate share of international attention. Expansion of commercial agriculture and extensive fires have placed the country in the top ten of all three league tables of forest loss in 2022: The second highest increase in forest loss (comparing 2015-2017 and 2020-2022), the third highest area of primary forest lost and the seventh highest loss in percentage terms. Clearing and burning have affected globally significant biodiversity reserves as well as the respiratory health of people affected by smoke from the fires. Strategies combining government regulation and enforcement with private sector action to get deforestation out of commodity supply chains and prevent uncontrolled burning proved effective in Brazil earlier this century and more recently in Indonesia; they are now desperately needed in Bolivia as well.

However, addressing the immediate causes and underlying drivers of deforestation is never easy, and is harder in some places than others.

For example, in the Congo Basin, much forest loss is due to small-scale clearing by very poor people for subsistence livelihoods. Pursuing a law enforcement approach to address such situations in the absence of viable economic alternatives and human rights protections is unacceptable. Instead, development finance is needed to provide access to clean energy sources to replace reliance on wood-based fuels, and to create other forest-friendly rural livelihood options.

2022 saw a dramatic rise in primary forest loss in Ghana, which suggests a similarly thorny set of challenges in addressing the portion of deforestation and forest degradation driven by the expansion of cocoa farming, among other drivers. Though the forest loss seen in Ghana is relatively small in absolute terms, the country had the highest proportion of loss of any tropical country in 2022 and has little primary forest left. Since 2017, Ghana, along with its neighbor Côte d’Ivoire, has partnered with dozens of leading cocoa and chocolate companies to get deforestation out of their supply chains in the Cocoa & Forests Initiative . Despite significant investments to support higher yields on existing farms and having mapped hundreds of thousands of cocoa farms to achieve traceability of more than two-thirds of cocoa purchased directly from smallholders, these efforts have not yet resulted in effective protection of Ghana’s dwindling area of primary forest. These efforts must be redoubled in light of new regulations in the European Union and the United Kingdom that will restrict the import of commodities linked to deforestation, as continued failure will put smallholder livelihoods as well as forests at risk.

2022 was the first year following the ambitious Glasgow Leaders Declaration signed by 145 heads of state at the UN climate summit (COP26) in 2021, promising to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.

The Declaration was accompanied by a suite of commitments, including those from public sector donors and private philanthropists to provide $12 billion of forest-related climate finance and $1.7 billion of financing to support Indigenous Peoples and local communities , and from private sector agricultural companies and financial institutions to halt forest loss associated with agricultural commodity production and trade.

The fact that the loss of tropical primary forests increased by 10% in 2022 suggests that front-line decision-makers who control the fate of the forests — such as government officials permitting new roads into intact forest areas, and farmers clearing additional land for their crops — have not yet felt a change in incentives sufficient to alter their behavior. While lag times in translating commitments into action are to be expected, it’s clear that current levels of effort to shift those incentives are too low and too slow to make a difference on the ground and at the pace needed .

But there is hope that new narratives and new leadership that have emerged over the last year could prompt enhanced ambition and accelerated action.

New narrative linking forests, climate and biodiversity

One cause for cautious optimism is the emerging alignment across initiatives aiming to harness forests for their climate mitigation potential and those aiming to conserve biodiversity.

In recent years, much of the international attention focused on tropical forests has emphasized their benefits for the global climate, for good reasons. The 2019 IPCC Special Report on Climate Change and Land concluded that “reducing deforestation and forest degradation rates represents one of the most effective and robust options for climate change mitigation, with large mitigation benefits globally,” and represents a “no regrets” strategy for mitigation, adaptation and other Sustainable Development Goals. The most recent IPCC Sixth Assessment Report (AR6) on climate change mitigation reinforced the message that, with deforestation accounting for 45% of land sector emissions, ending the conversion of tropical forests, peatlands and other carbon-rich ecosystems represents a high-priority, low-cost mitigation option . For example, Roe et al. 2019 estimated that the land sector could contribute up to 30% of the global carbon mitigation needed to limit warming to 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F).

While the special role of tropical forests in maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem services has long been recognized, over the last year a series of international events and initiatives have helped elevate the forest agenda and catalyze alignment on efforts to protect forests in ways that serve both climate and nature-oriented objectives. For example:

  • In December 2022, government Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity adopted the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework at COP15. The Framework mirrors the Glasgow Leaders Declaration, aiming to halt and reverse biodiversity loss by 2030. It builds on the prior endorsement by key countries and a broad range of stakeholders of the High Ambition Coalition for Nature and People’s 30x30 target — to protect 30% of the world’s land and oceans by 2030 — an objective that had already attracted $5 billion in early philanthropic funding pledges in 2021.
  • In rapid follow up to the climate and biodiversity COPs in late 2022, Presidents Emmanuel Macron of France and Ali Bongo Ondimba of Gabon co-hosted the One Forest Summit in March 2023 to shine a spotlight on the forests of the Congo Basin as especially important to both sets of global objectives. Discussions at the summit focused on ways to synergize across the two agendas, including by capturing biodiversity values in forest carbon crediting .

These initiatives could inject new energy into forest-related research, mobilize new sources of forest finance and attract new constituencies to the forest protection agenda. They could also increase the potency of advocacy decrying the clearing of some of the world’s most biodiversity-rich forests, which the 2022 data reveals is happening in several countries .

New leadership in key countries and institutions

High-level leadership of countries and institutions plays an important role in assembling political will and finance on the forest agenda. New leadership in key countries and international institutions could prove pivotal in 2023. For example:

  • Lula took office as President of Brazil in January 2023. Since then, he has signaled his intent to follow through on campaign promises to repeat the success of his previous administration in reducing deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. He has re-appointed as his Minister of Environment Marina Silva, who played a key role in assembling a whole-of-government approach to deforestation in the previous Lula administration, and appointed Sônia Guajajara, an Indigenous rights advocate and Member of Congress, to lead a new Ministry of Indigenous Affairs. Among Lula’s first actions was to launch an enforcement operation to drive illegal gold miners out of the Yanomami Indigenous territory in the Amazon. The fate of the world’s largest expanse of tropical forests rests on his ability to follow through with his promises — and while Lula faces political and economic headwinds, these indicators of his determination are a stark contrast to the impunity for forest destruction encouraged by his predecessor.
  • David Malpass stepped down as president of the World Bank under pressure after allegations of climate denialism. Leadership under new president Ajay Banga could swing the Bank’s considerable analytical and financial weight more squarely behind efforts to end tropical deforestation, and hopes are high that Banga will act quickly to follow through on prior commitments to mainstream climate and nature into the institution’s policies, analyses and operations. Among many opportunities, the Bank could build on the achievements of the Forest Carbon Partnership Facility and Carbon Fund in building capacity in forest-rich countries, and collaborate with the International Monetary Fund — now under the leadership of Kristalina Georgieva, an environmental economist who once led the World Bank Environment Department — to promote innovations in green finance.

In light of the political and financial commitments listed above, how can we most effectively deploy available resources in the limited time we have left to follow through on what science tells us is necessary to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement and end deforestation by 2030? Here are four actions to keep in mind:

1. We can target political attention and financial resources to the most important areas, drivers and actors with the most effective interventions

Thanks to the rapidly expanded quality and availability of forest monitoring data, not only can we detect where forest loss is taking place in near-real time, we can identify the causes of that loss and analyze past patterns to predict future trajectories of deforestation. Further, we can be increasingly confident that we know what works to slow and halt forest loss. We need to act on that knowledge.

Governments can apply policy tools that have proven effective, such as:

  • If forest loss is caused by illegal forest clearing by commercial actors, prior experience in Brazil and recent experience in Indonesia demonstrate that enhanced enforcement of legal and regulatory requirements can curtail it.
  • Establishing protected areas and recognizing Indigenous Peoples’ rights can slow advance of the deforestation frontier. For example, deforestation rates in the Amazon on securely held Indigenous land are 50% lower than areas outside Indigenous lands.
  • Officials can design fiscal incentives such as access to credit or direct payments to reward forest protection rather than subsidize forest clearing.
  • If building roads into intact forests is the main driver of encroachment (as an analysis of 2021 and 2022 deforestation hot spots in the Western Brazilian Amazon suggests is the case), officials can find alternative routes to meet legitimate needs for access to markets and services.

For companies that produce, trade or purchase commodities associated with deforestation — and for those in civil society who seek to influence those companies — overlaying maps that show forest cover change with related data sets (for example, locations of concessions) can pinpoint where to prioritize corporate risk management efforts or external advocacy.

In other words, companies and activists can analyze the linkages between where deforestation is happening and the boundaries of forest and plantation concessions, the locations of processing facilities, the shipments of exported commodities, and the financiers associated with each, and as a result, focus their interventions on the production areas, commodities, companies, financiers and consumers at highest risk of being implicated in deforestation.

Hundreds of companies and investors now use a suite of tools including Global Forest Watch Pro , Trase  and the  Accountability Framework to identify and manage deforestation risk in their supply chains and investment portfolios.

And while increased transparency has not always generated immediate changes in behavior, we know that access to better information can make a difference.

For example, an evaluation found that subscriptions to Global Forest Watch’s tree cover loss alerts in Africa were associated with an 18% decrease in the probability of deforestation.

Another study found that providing Indigenous communities in Peru with access to forest monitoring tools and training led to a dramatic 52% decrease in local deforestation in the first year, and 21% the following year.

2. We need to recognize that although many of the economic drivers of deforestation are linked to global flows of trade and finance, most of the politics are local

Certainly, the financial and capacity constraints in forest-rich developing countries are real, such as the inability of law enforcement officials to go into the field due to budget cuts, or local government officials’ lack of knowledge about how to attract carbon finance and other green investment opportunities. Yet the main limitation on action is lack of political will.

It's clear that global demand for commodities drives forest loss, and that failure to internalize the value of forests into global financial systems fuels deforestation-as-usual practices. And while it might be possible for domestic officials to stop those practices though a combination of the approaches described above, it often does not appear desirable for those with the power to do so.

Such calculations are often skewed by opportunities for personal enrichment achieved through corruption, or political advantage gained from the support of constituencies that profit from deforestation, regardless of the broader public interest.

The decision-makers who control the most direct levers to protect forests — the establishment and enforcement of legal, regulatory and fiscal regimes to protect forests — such as cabinet ministers and governors are responsive to domestic political constituencies and national development narratives. When vested interests are able to frame forest protection as coming at the expense of smallholders, jobs or national sovereignty, the political costs of forest-positive action rise.

As a result, appeals to global objectives served by protecting forests — including climate protection and biodiversity conservation — tend to fall flat, especially if they entail costs to important domestic constituencies.

Well-intended legislative initiatives in consumer countries to restrict imports of commodities linked to deforestation, such as a new EU regulation to exclude products associated with deforestation from European markets, could provoke a counter-productive backlash unless they are accompanied by incentives that create a value proposition for elected leaders.

Therefore, there is a need to raise awareness of the very real — but often hidden — domestic benefits of forest protection and the very real domestic costs of forest destruction, and of who bears those costs.

It is not a coincidence that Indonesia’s successful efforts to protect forests kicked in following the trauma of the catastrophic fires of 2015, which imposed an estimated $16 billion cost to the economy and exposed tens of millions of Indonesian citizens to hazardous air pollution.

Recent studies have illuminated how deforestation in Brazil results in costs on the agriculture sector from increased temperatures that depress soy yields, and from a shorter wet season that constrains double-cropping. Broader understanding of the size and distribution of these impacts could change the national political economy of deforestation.

Leaders of forest-rich countries are much more likely to follow through on the pledges they make at global summits if doing so aligns with domestic political and economic interests.

Taken together, recent scientific advances and forest loss data suggest prioritizing attention to High Forest Low Deforestation (HFLD) countries , states, provinces and Indigenous territories. Such areas have historically maintained low rates of forest loss and have not realized significant revenues from either agribusiness development or carbon finance. A jump in deforestation in Brazil’s Western Amazon states points to an urgent need to prompt a recalibration of forest-related interests going forward.

Meanwhile, the international community should find ways to recognize and reward the success of HFLD jurisdictions, such as Gabon, in maintaining already-low deforestation rates. Researchers estimate that while clearing of intact forests accounted for 3.2% of gross carbon emissions from all tropical deforestation, the full net carbon impact of intact forest destruction was at least 6 times greater when accounting for factors such as degradation and forgone capacity for continued carbon sequestration — and thus, there is a larger-than-realized mitigation potential from preventing the loss of remaining intact forests. In 2022, Guyana, another HFLD country, issued the first forest carbon credits independently verified to a recognized certification standard, and entered into a $750 million transaction for a portion of current and future credits.

3. We can rigorously and continuously evaluate more complex theories of change, and implement course corrections as soon as what works — and what doesn’t — become apparent

Proponents of tropical forest conservation are working on multiple initiatives to translate international interest in forest protection into politically salient value propositions for leaders in forest-rich countries. In effect, we are conducting several simultaneous and interconnected experiments to discover what works in changing the balance of incentives facing decision-makers. These initiatives include:

Putting a value on forest carbon: Since the idea of REDD+ first entered international climate negotiations 15 years ago, the promise of performance-based payments for forest protection has prompted incremental progress on building national systems for forest monitoring and other pillars to support improved forest management.

However, the limitations of donor funding also led to considerable disappointment and acrimony, which was on display when in 2021 Indonesia abruptly terminated its 10-year agreement with Norway in a dispute over payment. A new agreement was established in 2022.

Over the last two years, all eyes have been on the potential of the voluntary carbon market to generate the scale and type of finance that aid budgets were not designed to deliver. For example, the LEAF Coalition has mobilized more than $1 billion in commitments from private companies for jurisdictional-scale tropical forest protection and signed letters of intent with five countries to reduce emissions from deforestation.

But after a surge in 2021, demand for carbon credits of all types leveled off amid uncertainties related to what companies could claim based on credit purchases, and related to the quality of the credits themselves. Regarding tropical forest carbon credits in particular, there are lively ongoing debates over the relative merits of crediting at different scales and against different standards, the relative priority of emissions reductions vs. removals , and whether forest carbon crediting is more likely to benefit or cause harm to Indigenous and local communities. Guidance published in February 2023 by a coalition of civil society groups is designed to help corporate buyers navigate these debates.

Removing deforestation from commodity supply chains and financial portfolios: Civil society organizations have implemented increasingly sophisticated strategies to get deforestation out of commodity supply chains by blocking companies’ access to markets and finance if they defy laws and norms designed to protect forests and communities. The strategy includes demanding voluntary corporate action, shifting consumer and investor preferences and imposing demand-side policies in consumer countries. It’s difficult to discern the effectiveness of this bundle of strategies, and their potential to influence local producers with access to alternative domestic markets and investors or those in other emerging market countries is questionable.

A story to watch this year is whether or not Indonesia and Malaysia can continue to maintain historically low deforestation rates in the face of less favorable weather and/or higher palm oil prices, as fires in dry years and oil palm plantations have historically been huge drivers of tree cover loss.

Implementing these approaches at the scale of subnational jurisdictions: Linking the two strategies above are attempts to support improved forest and land-use management at sub-national levels, such as at the scale of states and provinces. Initiatives are underway in dozens of such jurisdictions across the tropics, and are often characterized by official commitments to reduce deforestation, efforts to develop and implement “green” development plans and multistakeholder platforms linked to companies’ commodity supply chain commitments. While there is growing literature describing the jurisdictional approach and theories of change, analysis of their impacts on deforestation rates is just beginning.

It is imperative that we rigorously assess these initiatives’ ultimate impacts on forests as they progress and adjust our strategies accordingly.

4. We can never forget that our efforts to protect forests will fail unless we stabilize the climate through other means as well

The science is clear that protecting forests — especially tropical forests — is an essential component of any strategy to avoid catastrophic climate change. And indeed, forests have not received a share of climate finance and political attention commensurate with their mitigation potential, which new science reveals is even larger than we thought. But at the end of the day, our efforts to protect forests must be accompanied by aggressive efforts to mitigate all sources of greenhouse gas emissions.

An alarming signal from forest monitoring data is that forests themselves are increasingly vulnerable to the rising average and extreme temperatures, erratic rainfall, severe storms and widespread pest infestations that a changing climate brings. One implication of this is that we need to avoid not just the wholesale conversion of remaining forests, but also degradation and fragmentation to maintain forests’ resilience to these mounting stressors. Another implication is that forest protection, restoration and other “ nature-based solutions ” cannot substitute for urgent mitigation action in other sectors.

In the context of forest carbon credits, this means that in addition to insisting on high quality on the supply side , we also have to ensure that demand for such credits represents additional mitigation action. In other words, companies or others making climate action claims based on carbon credit purchases should only do so in addition to reducing their own emissions as aggressively as is technologically and economically feasible, and in line with science .

2023 is poised to be an inflection point for the world’s forests.

Will the hope generated by pledges made at the 2021 COP continue to dissipate, or will we begin to see signs that they are shifting incentives that influence decisions around deforestation? Will the new international narrative joining climate and biodiversity conservation objectives stimulate significant new sources of support for protecting tropical forests, especially in HFLD countries? Will the current uncertainty hampering demand for tropical forest carbon credits be overcome sufficiently to enable the flow of finance?

Will President Lula be able to repeat his previous feat of reversing forest loss trends in Brazil?

Will Indonesia be able to maintain its historically low rate of forest loss, or face a reversal in light of increasing pressures?

Will forest loss in Bolivia attract the attention of domestic and international constituencies commensurate with its significance to global and local values?

Regular data updates from Global Forest Watch and other monitoring platforms will help answer some of these questions.

  • Latest on the World's Forests

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Deforestation and Forest Loss

Explore long-term changes in deforestation, and deforestation rates across the world today., which countries are gaining, and which are losing forest.

Before we look at trends in deforestation across the world specifically, it's useful to understand the net change in forest cover. The net change in forest cover measures any gains in forest cover – either through natural forest expansion or afforestation through tree-planting – minus deforestation.

This map shows the net change in forest cover across the world. Countries with a positive change (shown in green) are regrowing forest faster than they're losing it. Countries with a negative change (shown in red) are losing more than they're able to restore.

A note on UN FAO forestry data

Data on net forest change, afforestation and deforestation is sourced from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization's Forest Resources Assessment . Since year-to-year changes in forest cover can be volatile, the UN FAO provide this annual data averaged over five-year periods.

How much deforestation occurs each year?

Net forest loss is not the same as deforestation – it measures deforestation plus any gains in forest over a given period.

Over the decade since 2010, the net loss in forests globally was 4.7 million hectares per year. 1 However, deforestation rates were much significantly higher.

The UN FAO estimate that 10 million hectares of forest were cut down each year.

This interactive map shows deforestation rates across the world.

Many people think of environmental concerns as a modern issue: humanity’s destruction of nature and ecosystems as a result of very recent population growth and increasing consumption . This is true for some problems, such as climate change. But it’s not the case for deforestation. Humans have been cutting down trees for millennia.

How much forest has the world lost? When in history did we lose it?

In the chart we see how the cover of the earth’s surface has changed over the past 10,000 years. This is shortly after the end of the last great ice age, through to the present day. 2

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Let’s start at the top. You see that of the 14.9 billion hectares of land on the planet, only 71% of it is habitable – the other 29% is either covered by ice and glaciers, or is barren land such as deserts, salt flats, or dunes. I have therefore excluded these categories so we can focus on how habitable land is used.

The bar chart just below shows the earth’s surface cover just after the end of the last ice age. 3 10,000 years ago 57% of the world’s habitable land was covered by forest. That’s 6 billion hectares .  Today, only 4 billion hectares are left. The world has lost one-third of its forest – an area twice the size of the United States.

Only 10% of this was lost in the first half of this period, until 5,000 years ago. The global population at this time was small and growing very slowly – there were fewer than 50 million people in the world. The amount of land per person that was needed to produce enough food was not small – in fact, it was much larger than today. But a small global population overall meant there was little pressure on forests to make space for land to grow food, and as wood for energy.

If we fast-forward to 1700 when the global population had increased more than ten-fold, to 603 million. The amount of land used for agriculture – land to grow crops as well as grazing land for livestock – was expanding. You will notice in the chart that this was not only expanding into previously forested land, but also other land uses such as wild grasslands and shrubbery. Still, more than half of the world’s habitable land was forested.

The turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000 BC to 1900; the other half occurred in the last century alone. This emphasises two important points.

First, it reiterates that deforestation is not a new problem: relatively small populations of the past were capable of driving a large amount of forest loss. By 1900, there were 1.65 billion people in the world (five times fewer than we have today) but for most of the previous period, humans were deforesting the world with only tens or hundreds of millions. Even with the most basic of lifestyles compared to today’s standards, the per capita footprint of our ancestors would have been large. Low agricultural productivity and a reliance on wood for fuel meant that large amounts of land had to be cleared for basic provisions.

Second, it makes clear how much deforestation accelerated over the last century. In just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years. An area the size of the United States. From the chart we see that this was driven by the continued expansion of land for agriculture. When we think of the growing pressures on land from modern populations we often picture sprawling megacities. But urban land accounts for just 1% of global habitable land. Humanity’s biggest footprint is due to what we eat, not where we live.

How can we put an end to our long history of deforestation?

This might paint a bleak picture for the future of the world’s forests: the United Nations projects that the global population will continue to grow , reaching 10.8 billion by 2100. But there are real reasons to believe that this century doesn’t have to replicate the destruction of the last one.

The world passed ‘peaked deforestation’ in the 1980s and it has been on the decline since then – we take a look at rates of forest loss since 1700 in our follow-up post. Improvements in crop yields mean the per capita demand for agricultural land continues to fall. We see this in the chart. Since 1961, the amount of land we use for agriculture increased by only 7% . Meanwhile, the global population increased by 147% – from 3.1 to 7.6 billion. 4 This means that agricultural land per person more than halved, from 1.45 to 0.63 hectares.

In fact, the world may have already passed ‘peak agricultural land’ [we will look at this in more detail in an upcoming post] . And with the growth of technological innovations such as lab-grown meat and substitute products, there is the real possibility that we can continue to enjoy meat or meat-like foods while freeing up the massive amounts of land we use to raise livestock.

If we can take advantage of these innovations, we can bring deforestation to an end. A future with more people and more forest is possible.

Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Can we bring it to an end?

Since the end of the last great ice age – 10,000 years ago – the world has lost one-third of its forests. 5 Two billion hectares of forest – an area twice the size of the United States – has been cleared to grow crops, raise livestock, and use for fuelwood.

In a previous post we looked at this change in global forests over the long-run. What this showed was that although humans have been deforesting the planet for millennia, the rate of forest loss accelerated rapidly in the last few centuries. Half of global forest loss occurred between 8,000BC and 1900; the other half was lost in the last century alone.

To understand this more recent loss of forest, let’s zoom in on the last 300 years. The world lost 1.5 billion hectares of forest over that period. That’s an area 1.5-times the size of the United States.

In the chart we see the decadal losses and gains in global forest cover. On the horizontal axis we have time, spanning from 1700 to 2020; on the vertical axis we have the decadal change in forest cover. The taller the bar, the larger the change in forest area. This is measured in hectares, which is equivalent to 10,000 m².

Forest loss measures the net change in forest cover: the loss in forests due to deforestation plus any expansion of forest through afforestation. 6

Unfortunately there is no single source that provides consistent and transparent data on deforestation rates over this period of time. Methodologies change over time, and estimates – especially in earlier periods – are highly uncertain. This means I’ve had to use two separate datasets to show this change over time. As we’ll see, they produce different estimates of deforestation for an overlapping decade – the 1980s – which suggests that these are not directly comparable. I do not recommend combining them into a single series, but the overall trends are still applicable and tell us an important story about deforestation over the last three centuries.

The first series of data comes from Williams (2006), who estimates deforestation rates from 1700 to 1995. 7 Due to poor data resolution, these are often given as average rates over longer periods – for example, annual average rates are given over the period from 1700 to 1849, and 1920 to 1949. That’s why these rates look strangely consistent over long period of time.

The second series comes from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It produces a new assessment of global forests every 5 years. 8

Marimekko chart showing global deforestation since 1700. Rates increased until the 1980s, and have fallen since then.

The rate and location of forest loss changed a lot. From 1700 to 1850, 19 million hectares were being cleared every decade. That’s around half the size of Germany.

It was most temperate forests across Europe and North America that were being lost at this time. Population growth meant that today’s rich countries needed more and more resources such as land for agriculture, wood for energy, and for construction. 9

Moving into the 20th century there was a stepwise change in demand for agricultural land and energy from wood. Deforestation rates accelerated. And the hotspot of deforestation changed from the equivalent to the area of South Africa. This increase was mostly driven by tropical deforestation as countries across Asia and Latin America.

Global forest loss appears to have reached its peak in the 1980s. The two sources do not agree on the magnitude of this loss: Williams (2006) estimates a loss of 150 million hectares – an area half the size of India – during that decade.

Interestingly, the UN FAO 1990 report also estimated that deforestation in tropical ‘developing’ countries was 154 million hectares. But, it estimated that regrowth of old forests offset some of these losses, leading to a net loss of 102 million hectares. 10

The latest UN Forest Resources Assessment estimates that the net loss in forests has declined in the last three decades, from 78 million hectares in the 1990s to 47 million hectares in the 2010s.

This data maps an expected pathway based on what we know from how human-forest interactions evolve.

As we explore in more detail in our related article , countries tend to follow a predictable development in forest cover, a U-shaped curve. 11 They lose forests as populations grow and demand for agricultural land and fuel increases, but eventually they reach the so-called ‘forest transition point’ where they begin to regrow more forests than they lose.

That is what has happened in temperate regions: they have gone through a period of high deforestation rates, before a slowing and reversal of this trend.

However, many countries – particularly in the tropics and sub-tropics – are still moving through this transition. Deforestation rates are still very high.

Deforestation rates are still high across the tropics

Large areas of forest are still being lost in the tropics today. This is particularly tragic because these are regions with very high concentrations of biodiversity.

Let’s look at estimates of deforestation from the latest UN Forest report. This shows us raw deforestation rates, without any adjustment for the regrowth or plantation of forests, which is arguably not as good for ecosystems or carbon storage.

This is shown in the chart below.

We can see that the UN does estimate that deforestation rates have fallen since the 1990s. However, there was very little progress from the 1990s to 2000s, and an estimated 26% drop in rates in the 2010s. In 2022, the FAO published a separate assessment based on Remote Sensing methods; it did not report data for the 1990s, but also estimated a 29% reduction in deforestation rates from early 2000s to the 2010s.

A column chart showing the change in global deforestation in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Deforestation has fell in the 2010s.

This is progress, but it needs to happen much faster. The world is still losing large amounts of primary forests every year. To put these numbers in context: during the 1990s and first decade of the 2000s, an area almost the size of India was deforested. 12 Even with the ‘improved’ rates in the 2010s, this still amounted to an area around twice the size of Spain. 13

The regrowth of forests is a positive development. In the chart below, we see how this affects the net change in global forests. Forest recovery and plantation ‘offsets’ a lot of deforestation such that the net losses are around half the rates of deforestation alone.

A column chart showing the change in global deforestation and net forest loss in the 1990s, 2000s and 2010s. Deforestation has fell in the 2010s. Net loss fell in the 2000s and 2010s.

But we should be cautious here: it’s often not the case that the ‘positives’ of regrowing one hectare of forest offset the ‘losses’ of one hectare of deforestation. Cutting down one hectare of rich, tropical rainforest cannot be completely offset by the plantation of forest in a temperate country.

Forest expansion is positive, but does not negate the need to finally end deforestation.

The history of deforestation is a tragic one, in which we not only lost these wild and beautiful landscapes but also the wildlife within them. But, the fact that forest transitions are possible should give us confidence that a positive future is possible. Many countries have not only ended deforestation, but actually achieved substantial reforestation. It will be possible for our generation to achieve the same on the global scale and bring the 10,000 year history of forest loss to an end.

If we want to end deforestation we need to understand where and why it’s happening; where countries are within their transition; and what can be done to accelerate their progress through it. We need to pass the transition point as soon as possible, while minimising the amount of forest we lose along the way.

In this article I look at what’s driving deforestation: that helps us understand what we need to do to solve it.

Forest definitions and comparisons to other datasets

There is no universal definition of what a ‘forest’ is. That means there are a range of estimates of forest area, and how this has changed over time.

In this article, in the recent period I have used data from the UN’s Global Forest Resources Assessment (2020). The UN carries out these global forest stocktakes every five years. These forest figures are widely-used in research, policy, and international targets, such as in the Sustainable Development Goals .

The UN FAO has a very specific definition of a forest. It’s “land spanning more than 0.5 hectares with trees higher than 0.5 meters and a canopy cover of more than 10%, or trees able to reach these thresholds in situ.”

In other words, it has criteria for the area that must be covered (0.5 hectares), the minimum height of trees (0.5 meters) and a density of at least 10%.

Compare this to the UN Framework on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which uses forest estimates to calculate land use carbon emissions, and for its REDD+ programme, where low-to-middle income countries can receive finance for verified projects that prevent or reduce deforestation. It defines a forest as having a density of 10-30%, a minimum tree height of 2-5 meters, and a smaller area of 0.1 hectares.

It’s not just forest definitions that vary between sources. What is measured (and not measured) differs too. Global Forest Watch is an interactive online dashboard that tracks ‘tree loss’ and ‘forest loss’ across the world. It measures this in real-time, and can provide better estimates of year-to-year variations in rates of tree loss.

However, the UN FAO and Global Forest Watch do not measure the same thing.

The UN FAO measures deforestation based on how land is used. It measures the permanent conversion of forested land to another use, such as pasture, croplands, or urbanization. Temporary changes in forest cover, such as losses through wildfire, or small-scale shifting agriculture are not included in deforestation figures, because it is assumed that they will regrow. If the use of land has not changed, it is not considered deforestation.

Global Forest Watch (GFW) measures temporary changes in forests. It can detect changes in land cover , but does not differentiate the underlying land use. All deforestation would be considered tree loss, but a lot of tree loss would not be considered as deforestation.

As GFW describes in its definition of ‘forest loss’: “Loss” indicates the removal or mortality of tree cover and can be due to a variety of factors, including mechanical harvesting, fire, disease, or storm damage. As such, “loss” does not equate to deforestation.”

We therefore cannot directly compare these sources. This article from Global Forest Watch gives a good overview of the differences between the UN FAO and GFW methods.

Since GFW uses satellite imagery, its methods continually improve. This makes its ability to detect changes in forest cover even stronger. But it also means that comparisons over time are more difficult. It currently warns against comparing pre-2015 and post-2015 data since there was a significant methodological change at that time. Note that this is also a problem in UN FAO reports, as I’ll soon explain.

What data from GFW makes clear is that forest loss across the tropics is still very high, and in the last few years, little progress has been made. Since UN FAO reports are only published in 5-year intervals, they miss these shorter-term fluctuations in forest loss. The GFW’s shorter-interval stocktakes of how countries are doing will become increasingly valuable.

One final point to note is that UN FAO estimates have also changed over time, with improved methods and better access to data.

I looked at how net forest loss rates in the 1990s were reported across five UN reports: 2000, 2005, 2010, 2015 and 2020.

Estimated rates changed in each successive report:

  • 2000 report : Net losses of 92 million hectares
  • 2005 report : 89 million hectares
  • 2010 report : 83 million hectares
  • 2015 report : 72 million hectares
  • 2020 report : 78 million hectares

This should not affect the overall trends reported in the latest report: the UN FAO should – as far as is possible – apply the same methodology to its 1990s, 2000s, and 2010s estimates. However, it does mean we should be cautious about comparing absolute magnitudes across different reports.

This is one challenge in presenting 1980 figures in the main visualization in this article. Later reports have not updated 1980 figures, so we have to rely on estimates from earlier reports. We don’t know whether 1980s rates would also be lower with the UN FAO’s most recent adjustments. If so, this would mean the reductions in net forest loss from the 1980s to 1990s were lower than is shown from available data.

Forest Transitions: why do we lose then regain forests?

Globally we deforest around ten million hectares of forest every year. 14 That’s an area the size of Portugal every year. Around half of this deforestation is offset by regrowing forests, so overall we lose around five million hectares each year.

Nearly all – 95% – of this deforestation occurs in the tropics . But not all of it is to produce products for local markets. 14% of deforestation is driven by consumers in the world’s richest countries – we import beef, vegetable oils, cocoa, coffee and paper that has been produced on deforested land. 15

The scale of deforestation today might give us little hope for protecting our diverse forests. But by studying how forests have changed over time, there’s good reason to think that a way forward is possible.

Many countries have lost then regained forest over millennia

Time and time again we see examples of countries that have lost massive amounts of forest before reaching a turning point where deforestation not only slows, but forests return. In the chart we see historical reconstructions of country-level data on the share of land covered by forest (over decades, centuries or even millennia depending on the country). I have reconstructed long-term data using various studies which I’ve documented here .

Many countries have much less forest today than they did in the past. Nearly half (47%) of France was forested 1000 years ago; today that’s just under one-third (31.4%). The same is true of the United States; back in 1630 46% of the area of today’s USA was covered by forest. Today that’s just 34%.

1000 years ago, 20% of Scotland’s land was covered by forest. By the mid-18th century, only 4% of the country was forested. But then the trend turned, and it moved from deforestation to reforestation. For the last two centuries forests have been growing and are almost back to where they were 1000 years ago. 16

Forest Transitions: the U-shaped curve of forest change

What’s surprising is how consistent the pattern of change is across so many countries; as we’ve seen they all seem to follow a ‘U-shaped curve’. They first lose lots of forest, but reach a turning point and begin to regain it again.

We can illustrate this through the so-called ‘Forest Transition Model’. 17 This is shown in the chart. It breaks the change in forests into four stages, explained by two variables: the amount of forest cover a region has, and the annual change in cover (how quickly it is losing or gaining forest). 18

Stage 1 – The Pre-Transition phase is defined by having high levels of forest cover and no or only very slow losses over time. Countries may lose some forest each year, but this is at a very slow rate. Mather refers to an annual loss of less than 0.25% as a small loss.

Stage 2 – The Early Transition phase is when countries start to lose forests very rapidly. Forest cover falls quickly, and the annual loss of forest is high.

Stage 3 – The Late Transition phase is when deforestation rates start to slow down again. At this stage, countries are still losing forest each year but at a lower rate than before. At the end of this stage, countries are approaching the ‘transition point’.

Stage 4 – The Post-Transition phase is when countries have passed the ‘transition point’ and are now gaining forest again. At the beginning of this phase, the forest area is at its lowest point. But forest cover increases through reforestation. The annual change is now positive.

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Why do countries lose then regain forest?

Many countries have followed this classic U-shaped pattern. What explains this?

There are two reasons that we cut down forests:

  • Forest resources: we want the resources that they provide – the wood for fuel, building materials, or paper;
  • Land: – we want to use the land they occupy for something else – farmland to grow crops; pasture to raise livestock; or land to build roads and cities.

Our demand for both of these initially increases as populations grow and poor people get richer . We need more fuelwood to cook, more houses to live in, and importantly, more food to eat.

But, as countries continue to get richer this demand slows. The rate of population growth tends to slow down. Instead of using wood for fuel we switch to fossil fuels , or hopefully, more renewables and nuclear energy . Our crop yields improve and so we need less land for agriculture.

This demand for resources and land is not always driven by domestic markets. As I mentioned earlier, 14% of deforestation today is driven by consumers in rich countries.

The Forest Transition therefore tends to follow a ‘development’ pathway. 19 As a country achieves economic growth it moves through each of the four stages. This explains historical trends we see for countries across the world today. Rich countries – such as the USA, France and the United Kingdom – have had a long history of deforestation but are now passed the transition point. Most deforestation today occurs in low-to-middle income countries.

Where are countries in the transition today?

If we look at where countries are in their transition today we can understand where we expect to lose and gain forest in the coming decades. Most of our future deforestation is going to come from countries in the pre- or early-transition phase.

Several studies have assessed the stage of countries across the world. 20 The most recent analysis to date was published by Florence Pendrill and colleagues (2019) which looked at each country’s stage in the transition, the drivers of deforestation but also the role of international trade. 21 To do this, they used the standard metrics discussed in our theory of forest transitions earlier: the share of land that is forested, and the annual change in forest cover.

In the map we see their assessment of each country’s stage in the transition. Most of today’s richest countries – all of Europe, North America, Japan, South Korea – have passed the turning point and are now regaining forest. This is also true for major economies such as China and India. That these countries have recently regained forests is also visible in the long-term forest trends above.

Across sub-tropical countries we have a mix: many upper-middle income countries are now in the late transition phase. Brazil, for example, went through a period of very rapid deforestation in the 1980s and 90s (its ‘early transition’ phase) but its losses have slowed, meaning it is now in the late transition. Countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are in the early transition phase and are losing forests quickly. Some of the world’s poorest countries are still in the pre-transition phase. In the coming decades this is where we might expect to see the most rapid loss of forests unless these countries take action to prevent it, and the world supports them in the goal.

Not all forest loss is equal: what is the difference between deforestation and forest degradation?

15 billion trees are cut down every year. 22 The Global Forest Watch project – using satellite imagery – estimates that global tree loss in 2019 was 24 million hectares. That’s an area the size of the United Kingdom.

These are big numbers, and important ones to track: forest loss creates a number of negative impacts, ranging from carbon emissions to species extinctions and biodiversity loss. But distilling changes to this single metric – tree or forest loss – comes with its own issues.

The problem is that it treats all forest loss as equal. It assumes the impact of clearing primary rainforest in the Amazon to produce soybeans is the same as logging planted forests in the UK. The latter will experience short-term environmental impacts, but will ultimately regrow. When we cut down primary rainforest we are transforming this ecosystem forever.

When we treat these impacts equally we make it difficult to prioritize our efforts in the fight against deforestation. Decisionmakers could give as much of our attention to European logging as to destruction of the Amazon. As we will see later, this would be a distraction from our primary concern: ending tropical deforestation. The other issue that arises is that ‘tree loss’ or ‘forest loss’ data collected by satellite imagery often doesn’t match the official statistics reported by governments in their land use inventories. This is because the latter only captures deforestation – the replacement of forest with another land use (such as cropland). It doesn’t capture trees that are cut down in planted forests; the land is still forested, it’s now just regrowing forest.

In the article we will look at the reasons we lose forest; how these can be differentiated in a useful way; and what this means for understanding our priorities in tackling forest loss.

Understanding and seeing the drivers of forest loss

‘Forest loss’ or ‘tree loss’ captures two fundamental impacts on forest cover: deforestation and forest degradation .

Deforestation is the complete removal of trees for the conversion of forest to another land use such as agriculture, mining, or towns and cities. It results in a permanent conversion of forest into an alternative land use. The trees are not expected to regrow . Forest degradation measures a thinning of the canopy – a reduction in the density of trees in the area – but without a change in land use. The changes to the forest are often temporary and it’s expected that they will regrow.

From this understanding we can define five reasons why we lose forests:

  • Commodity-driven deforestation is the long-term, permanent conversion of forests to other land uses such as agriculture (including oil palm and cattle ranching), mining, or energy infrastructure.
  • Urbanization is the long-term, permanent conversion of forests to towns, cities and urban infrastructure such as roads.
  • Shifting agriculture is the small to medium-scale conversion of forest for farming, that is later abandoned so that forests regrow. This is common of local, subsistence farming systems where populations will clear forest, use it to grow crops, then move on to another plot of land.
  • Forestry production is the logging of managed, planted forests for products such as timber, paper and pulp. These forests are logged periodically and allowed to regrow.
  • Wildfires destroy forests temporarily. When the land is not converted to a new use afterwards forests can regrow in the following years.

Thanks to satellite imagery, we can get a birds-eye view of what these drivers look like from above. In the figure we see visual examples from the study of forest loss classification by Philip Curtis et al. (2018), published in Science . 23

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Commodity-driven deforestation and urbanization are deforestation : the forested land is completely cleared and converted into another land use – a farm, mining site, or city. The change is permanent. There is little forest left. Forestry production and wildfires usually result in forest degradation – the forest experiences short-term disturbance but if left alone is likely to regrow. The change is temporary. This is nearly always true of planted forests in temperate regions – there, planted forests are long-established and do not replace primary existing forests. In the tropics, some forestry production can be classified as deforestation when primary rainforests are cut down to make room for managed tree plantations. 21

'Shifting agriculture’ is usually classified as degradation because the land is often abandoned and the forests regrow naturally. But it can bridge between deforestation and degradation depending on the timeframe and permanence of these agricultural practices.

One-quarter of forest loss comes from tropical deforestation

We’ve seen the five key drivers of forest loss. Let’s put some numbers to them.

In their analysis of global forest loss, Philip Curtis and colleagues used satellite images to assess where and why the world lost forests between 2001 and 2015. The breakdown of forest loss globally, and by region, is shown in the chart. 23

Just over one-quarter of global forest loss is driven by deforestation. The remaining 73% came from the three drivers of forest degradation: logging of forestry products from plantations (26%); shifting, local agriculture (24%); and wildfires (23%).

We see massive differences in how important each driver is across the world. 95% of the world’s deforestation occurs in the tropics [we look at this breakdown again later]. In Latin America and Southeast Asia in particular, commodity-driven deforestation – mainly the clearance of forests to grow crops such as palm oil and soy, and pasture for beef production – accounts for almost two-thirds of forest loss.

In contrast, most forest degradation – two-thirds of it – occurs in temperate countries. Centuries ago it was mainly temperate regions that were driving global deforestation [we take a look at this longer history of deforestation in a related article ] . They cut down their forests and replaced it with agricultural land long ago. But this is no longer the case: forest loss across North America and Europe is now the result of harvesting forestry products from tree plantations, or tree loss in wildfires.

Africa is also different here. Forests are mainly cut and burned to make space for local, subsistence agriculture or for fuelwood for energy. This ‘shifting agriculture’ category can be difficult to allocate between deforestation and degradation: it often requires close monitoring over time to understand how permanent these agricultural practices are.

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Africa is also an outlier as a result of how many people still rely on wood as their primary energy source. Noriko Hosonuma et al. (2010) looked at the primary drivers of deforestation and degradation across tropical and subtropical countries specifically. 24  The breakdown of forest degradation drivers is shown in the following chart. Note that in this study, the category of subsistence agriculture was classified as a deforestation driver, and so is not included. In Latin America and Asia the dominant driver of degradation was logging for products such as timber, paper and pulp – this accounted for more than 70%. Across Africa, fuelwood and charcoal played a much larger role – it accounted for more than half (52%).

This highlights an important point: less than 20% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to clean fuels for cooking, meaning they still rely on wood and charcoal. With increasing development, urbanization and access to other energy resources, Africa will shift from local, subsistence activities into commercial commodity production – both in agricultural products and timber extraction. This follows the classic ‘forest transition’ model with development, which we look at in more detail in a related article .

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Tropical deforestation should be our primary concern

The world loses almost six million hectares of forest each year to deforestation. That’s like losing an area the size of Portugal every two years. 95% of this occurs in the tropics. The breakdown of deforestation by region is shown in the chart. 59% occurs in Latin America, with a further 28% from Southeast Asia. In a related article we look in much more detail at what agricultural products, and which countries are driving this.

As we saw previously, this deforestation accounts for around one-quarter of global forest loss. 27% of forest loss results from ‘commodity-driven deforestation’ – cutting down forests to grow crops such as soy, palm oil, cocoa, to raise livestock on pasture, and mining operations. Urbanization, the other driver of deforestation accounts for just 0.6%. It’s the foods and products we buy, not where we live, that has the biggest impact on global land use.

It might seem odd to argue that we should focus our efforts on tackling this quarter of forest loss (rather than the other 73%). But there is good reason to make this our primary concern.

Philipp Curtis and colleagues make this point clear. At their Global Forest Watch platform they were already presenting maps of forest loss across the world. But they wanted to contribute to a more informed discussion about where to focus forest conservation efforts by understanding why forests were being lost. To quote them, they wanted to prevent “a common misperception that any tree cover loss shown on the map represents deforestation”. And to “identify where deforestation is occurring; perhaps as important, show where forest loss is not deforestation”.

Why should we care most about tropical deforestation? There is a geographical argument (why the tropics?) and an argument for why deforestation is worse than degradation.

Tropical forests are home to some of the richest and most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Over half of the world’s species reside in tropical forests. 25 Endemic species are those which only naturally occur in a single country. Whether we look at the distribution of endemic mammal species , bird species , or amphibian species , the map is the same: subtropical countries are packed with unique wildlife. Habitat loss is the leading driver of global biodiversity loss. 26 When we cut down rainforests we are destroying the habitats of many unique species, and reshaping these ecosystems permanently. Tropical forests are also large carbon sinks, and can store a lot of carbon per unit area. 27

Deforestation also results in larger losses of biodiversity and carbon relative to degradation. Degradation drivers, including logging and especially wildfires can definitely have major impacts on forest health: animal populations decline, trees can die, and CO 2 is emitted. But the magnitude of these impacts are often less than the complete conversion of forest. They are smaller, and more temporary. When deforestation happens, almost all of the carbon stored in the trees and vegetation – called the ‘aboveground carbon loss’ –  is lost. Estimates vary, but on average only 10-20% of carbon is lost during logging, and 10-30% from fires. 28 In a study of logging practices in the Amazon and Congo, forests retained 76% of their carbon stocks shortly after logging. 29 Logged forests recover their carbon over time, as long as the land is not converted to other uses (which is what happens in the case of deforestation).

Deforestation tends to occur on forests that have been around for centuries, if not millennia. Cutting them down disrupts or destroys established, species-rich ecosystems. The biodiversity of managed tree plantations which are periodically cut, regrown, cut again, then regrown is not the same.

That is why we should be focusing on tropical deforestation. Since agriculture is responsible for 60 to 80% of it, what we eat, where it’s sourced from, and how it is produced is our strongest lever to bring deforestation to an end.

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Do rich countries import deforestation from overseas?

There is a marked divide in the state of the world’s forests. In most rich countries, across Europe, North America and East Asia, forest cover is increasing , whilst in many low-to-middle income countries it’s decreasing.

But, it would be wrong to think that the only impact rich countries have on global forests is through changes in their domestic forests. They also contribute to global deforestation through the foods they import from poorer countries.

Today, most deforestation occurs in the tropics. 71% of this is driven by demand in domestic markets, and the remaining 29% for the production of products that are traded. 40% of traded deforestation ends up in high-income countries, meaning they are responsible for 12% of deforestation. 30

Let’s take a look at which countries are causing deforestation overseas and the size of this impact.

Which countries are causing deforestation overseas?

How much do people in rich countries contribute to deforestation overseas?

To investigate this question, researchers Florence Pendrill et al. (2019) quantified the deforestation embedded in traded goods between countries. 21 They did this by calculating the amount of deforestation associated with specific food and forestry products, and combining it with a trade model.

In the map we see the net deforestation embedded in trade for each country. This is calculated by taking each country’s imported deforestation and subtracting its exported deforestation. Net importers of deforestation (shown in brown) are countries that contribute more to deforestation in other countries than they do in their home country. The consumption choices of people in these countries cause deforestation elsewhere in the world.

For example, after we adjust for all the goods that the UK imports and exports, it caused more deforestation elsewhere than it did domestically. It was a net importer. Brazil, in contrast, caused more deforestation domestically in the production of goods for other countries than it imported from elsewhere. It was a net exporter.

Although there is some year-to-year variability [you can explore the data use the timeline on the bottom of the chart from 2005 to 2013] we see a reasonably consistent divide: most countries across Europe and North America are net importers of deforestation i.e. they’re driving deforestation elsewhere; whilst many subtropical countries are partly cutting down trees to meet this demand from rich countries.

Most deforestation occurs for the production of goods that are consumed within domestic markets. 71% of deforestation is for domestic production. Less than one-third (29%) is for the production of goods that are traded.

High-income countries were the largest 'importers' of deforestation, accounting for 40% of it. This means they were responsible for 12% of global deforestation. 31 It is therefore true that rich countries are causing deforestation in poorer countries.

Are countries importing more deforestation than they’re regrowing domestically?

Many rich countries are driving deforestation in other parts of the world, but are regrowing forests domestically. 79% of exported deforestation ended up in those countries that had stopped losing domestic forests.

How do these two measures compare? Are they causing more deforestation elsewhere than they are regenerating in forests at home?

Let’s take an example. Imagine some temperate country was responsible for the deforestation of 25,000 hectares in tropical countries but was restoring its own forests at a rate of 50,000 hectares per year. On balance, it would still have a positive impact on the size of global forests; its net contribution would be increasing forest area by 25,000 hectares. 32 However, this country might still be causing more damage than this for a couple of reasons. Not all forest is equal. Tropical forests are often more productive than temperate forests, meaning they store more carbon. They are also richer sites of biodiversity. And, we might place more value on preserving primary, native forests that haven’t yet been deforested over regrowing forests that have lost their previous ecosystems. Hence, we should keep in mind that forest area is not the only aspect that matters – where that forest is and how rich in life it is matters too.

It would be good if there was data available that would capture these additional aspects. We manage to capture some of these differences in carbon in our related article on deforestation emissions embedded in trade . Without reliable metrics that capture all of these differences, we will have to stick with total changes in forest area for now. But we should keep these important aspects in mind when comparing forest losses and gains.

In the chart we see the comparison between the change in domestic forest area, and deforestation driven by imported goods. 33 On the vertical axis we have the domestic change in forest area: this is shown only for countries where the forest area is increasing. Since there is often year-to-year variability in deforestation or reforestation rates, this is shown as the five-year average. On the x-axis we have imported deforestation. The grey line marks where the area of domestic regrowth of forests is exactly equal to imported deforestation. Countries that lie along this line would have a net-neutral impact on global forests: the area they are causing to deforestation overseas is exactly as large as the area they are regrowing at home.

Countries which lie above the grey line – such as the United States, Finland, China – restore more forest each year domestically than they import from elsewhere. For example, the US ‘imported’ 64,000 hectares of deforested land, but increased its domestic forest area by 275,000 hectares. More than four times as much. On balance, they add to the global forest stock.

Countries below the line – such as the UK and Germany – are not growing forests fast enough to offset the deforestation they’re creating elsewhere. The UK ‘imported’ 34,000 hectares of deforestation but increased its domestic forests by only 19,000 hectares. These countries might have high levels of afforestation at home, but they’re still having a net negative impact on the size of the world’s forests.

Rich countries need to be more conscious of how they’re contributing to global deforestation

After seeing this data, people might argue that we should cut back on trade. If poorer countries are cutting down forests to make food for rich consumers, then we should just stop trading these goods.

But the solution is not so simple. There are other aspects to consider. International trade is important for socioeconomic development. Many farmers rely on international buyers to earn a living and improve their livelihoods. Not only would this be bad for people, it might also be bad for forests.

One of the reasons poorer countries clear forest to make room for farmland is that they achieve low crop yields . If you struggle to increase crop yields but want to produce more food, then expanding your agricultural land is the only option. This often comes at the cost of forests. Improvements in agricultural productivity tends to both drive and follow economic growth . International trade plays an important role in this growth, and may allow farmers to see the yield gains they need to produce more food using less land.

So, what can we do?

One option is to adopt stricter guidelines on what suppliers to source from, and implementing zero-deforestation policies that stop the trade of goods that have been produced on deforested land. Another way that richer countries can contribute is by investing in technologies – such as improved seed varieties, fertilizers and agricultural practices – that allow farmers to increase yields. That’s both an economic and environmental win.

The first step in doing this is for rich countries to monitor their deforestation impacts overseas more closely. They should keep their domestic reforestation targets in perspective with their net impact on global forests. Sometimes these restoration programmes pale in comparison to the deforestation they’re driving elsewhere.

Carbon emissions from deforestation: are they driven by domestic demand or international trade?

95% of global deforestation occurs in the tropics. Brazil and Indonesia alone account for almost half. After long periods of forest clearance in the past, most of today’s richest countries are increasing tree cover through afforestation.

This might put the responsibility for ending deforestation solely on tropical countries. But, supply chains are international. What if this deforestation is being driven by consumers elsewhere?

Many consumers are concerned that their food choices are linked to deforestation in some of these hotspots. Since three-quarters of tropical deforestation is driven by agriculture, that’s a valid concern. It feeds into the popular idea that ‘eating local’ is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint. In a previous article I showed that the types of food you eat matter much more for your carbon footprint than where it comes from – this is because transport usually makes up a small percentage of your food’s emissions, even if it comes from the other side of the world. If you want to reduce your carbon footprint, reducing meat and dairy intake – particularly beef and lamb – has the largest impact.

But, understanding the role of deforestation in the products we buy is important. If we can identify the producer countries, importing countries, and specific products responsible, we can direct our efforts towards interventions that will really make a difference.

One-third of CO 2 emissions from deforestation are embedded in international trade

In a study published in Global Environmental Change , Florence Pendrill and colleagues investigated where tropical deforestation was occurring; what products were driving this; and, using global trade models, they traced where these products were going in international supply chains. 34

They found that tropical deforestation – given as the annual average between 2010 and 2014 – was responsible for 2.6 billion tonnes of CO 2 per year. That was 6.5% of global CO 2 emissions. 35

International trade was responsible for around one-third (29%) of these emissions. This is probably less than many people would expect. Most emissions – 71% – came from foods consumed in the country that they were produced. It’s domestic demand, not international trade, that is the main driver of deforestation.

In the chart we see how emissions from tropical deforestation are distributed through international supply chains. On the left-hand side we have the countries (grouped by region) where deforestation occurs, and on the right we have the countries and regions where these products are consumed. The paths between these end boxes indicate where emissions are being traded – the wider the bar, the more emissions are embedded in these products.

Latin America exports around 23% of its emissions; that means more than three-quarters are generated for products that are consumed within domestic markets. The Asia-Pacific region – predominantly Indonesia and Malaysia – export a higher share: 44%. As we will see later, this is dominated by palm oil exports to Europe, China, India, North America and the Middle East. Deforestation in Africa is mainly driven by local populations and markets; only 9% of its emissions are exported.

Since international demand is driving one-third of deforestation emissions, we have some opportunity to reduce emissions through global consumers and supply chains. But most emissions are driven by domestic markets – this means policies in the major producer countries will be key to tackling this problem.

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How much deforestation emissions is each country responsible for?

Let’s now focus on the consumers of products driving deforestation. After we adjust for imports and exports, how much CO 2 from deforestation is each country responsible for?

Rather than looking at total figures by country [if you’re interested, we have mapped them here ] we have calculated the per capita footprint. This gives us an indication of the impact of the average person’s diet. Note that this only measures the emissions from tropical deforestation – it doesn’t include any other emissions from agricultural production, such as methane from livestock, or rice, or the use of fertilizers.

In the chart we see deforestation emissions per person, measured in tonnes of CO 2 per year. For example, the average German generated half a tonne (510 kilograms) of CO 2 per person from domestic and imported foods.

At the top of the list we see some of the major producer countries – Brazil and Indonesia. The fact that the per capita emissions after trade are very high means that a lot of their food products are consumed by people in Brazil and Indonesia. The diet of the average Brazilian creates 2.7 tonnes of CO 2 from deforestation alone. That’s more than the country’s CO 2 emissions from fossil fuels , which are around 2.2 tonnes per person.

But we also see that some countries which import a lot of food have high emissions. Luxembourg has the largest footprint at nearly three tonnes per person. Imported emissions are also high for Taiwan, Belgium and the Netherlands at around one tonne.

The average across the EU was 0.3 tonnes CO 2 per person. To put this in perspective, that would be around one-sixth of the total carbon footprint of the average EU diet. 36

Beef, soybeans and palm oil are the key drivers of deforestation

We know where deforestation emissions are occurring, and where this demand is coming from. But we also need to know what products are driving this. This helps consumers understand what products they should be concerned about, but also allows us to target specific supply chains.

As we covered in a previous article , 60% of tropical deforestation is driven by beef, soybean and palm oil production. We should not only look at where these foods are produced, but also where the consumer demand is coming from.

In the chart here we see the breakdown of deforestation emissions by product for each consumer country. The default is shown for Brazil, but you can explore the data for a range of countries using the “Change country” button.

We see very clearly that the large Brazilian footprint is driven by its domestic demand for beef. In China, the biggest driver is demand for ‘oilseeds’ – which is the combination of soy imported from Latin America and palm oil, imported from Indonesia and Malaysia.

Across the US and Europe the breakdown of products is more varied. But, overall, oilseeds and beef tend to top the list for most countries.

Bringing all of these elements together, we can focus on a few points that should help us prioritise our efforts to end deforestation. Firstly, international trade does play a role in deforestation – it’s responsible for almost one-third of emissions. By combining our earlier Sankey diagram, and breakdown of emissions by product, we can see that we can tackle a large share of these emissions through only a few key trade flows. Most traded emissions are embedded in soy and palm oil exports to China and India; and beef, soy and palm oil exports to Europe. The story of both soy and palm oil are complex – and it’s not obvious that eliminating these products will fix the problem. We therefore look at them both individually in more detail, to better understand what we can do about it.

But international markets alone cannot fix this problem. Most tropical deforestation is driven by demand for products in domestic markets. Brazil’s emissions are high because Brazilians eat a lot of beef. Africa’s emissions are high because people are clearing forests to produce more food. This means interventions at the national-level will be key: this can include a range of solutions including policies such as Brazil’s soy moratorium, the REDD+ programme to compensate for the opportunity costs of preserving these forests, and improvements in agricultural productivity so countries can continue to produce more food on less land.

FAO. 2020. Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020 – Key findings. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca8753en

The data used in this chart comes from several sources.

Forests – this data is primarily sourced from the UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). It provides long-term estimates on forest cover in 10,000 and 5,000 years BP. Its State of the World’s Forests report provides estimates of global forest cover today, and rates of change over previous decades. In a related post we have combined this FAO data with global deforestation rates from Williams (2003) to document forest change over the last 300 years – this gives us data on forest change from 1700 onwards.

The definition of 'forest' can vary depending on aspects such as tree density and height. Absolute estimates of forest cover from other sources may differ for this reason. However, most align on the relative change in forests over this period. For example, Ellis et al. (2020). estimate a 35% loss of global forest cover since 10,000. This is very close to our estimate of a one-third loss.

Agricultural and urban land – The UN FAO Statistical database provides data on global agricultural and urban land from 1961 onwards. Pre-1961 land use is sourced from the work of Ellis et al. (2020).

FAO and UNEP. 2020. The State of the World’s Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people . Rome.

Williams, M. (2003). Deforesting the earth: from prehistory to global crisis. University of Chicago Press.

Ellis, E. C., Beusen, A. H., & Goldewijk, K. K. (2020). Anthropogenic Biomes: 10,000 BCE to 2015 CE . Land , 9(5), 129.

Estimates vary, but most date the end of the last great ice age to around 11,700 years ago.Kump, L. R., Kasting, J. F., & Crane, R. G. (2004). The Earth System (Vol. 432) . Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

We can calculate this increase as [(7.63 billion - 3.09 billion) / 3.09 billion * 100 = 147%].

Estimates vary, but most date the end of the last great ice age to around 11,700 years ago.

Kump, L. R., Kasting, J. F., & Crane, R. G. (2004). The Earth System (Vol. 432). Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Year-to-year data on forest change comes with several issues: either data at this resolution is not available, or year-to-year changes can be highly variable. For this reason, data sources – including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization – tend to aggregate annual losses as the average over five-year or decadal periods.

The data for 1990 to 2000 is from the altest assessment: the UN’s Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020.

FAO (2020). Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020: Main report. Rome. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca9825en .

Mather, A. S., Fairbairn, J., & Needle, C. L. (1999). The course and drivers of the forest transition: the case of France. Journal of Rural Studies, 15(1), 65-90.

Mather, A. S., & Needle, C. L. (2000). The relationships of population and forest trends. Geographical Journal, 166(1), 2-13.

It estimated that the net change in forests without plantations was 121 million hectares. With plantations included – as is standard for the UN’s forest assessments – this was 102 million hectares.

Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., … & Romijn, E. (2012). An assessment of deforestation and forest degradation drivers in developing countries. Environmental Research Letters, 7(4), 044009.

The area of India is around 330 million hectares. The combined losses in the 1990s and 2000s was 309 million hectares. Just 6% less than the size of India.

The area of Spain is around 51 million hectares. Double this area is around 102 million hectares – a little under 110 million hectares.

The UN Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) Forest Resources Assessment estimates global deforestation, averaged over the five-year period from 2015 to 2020 was 10 million hectares per year.

If we sum countries’ imported deforestation by World Bank income group , we find that high-income countries were responsible for 14% of imported deforestation; upper-middle income for 52%; lower-middle income for 23%; and low income for 11%.

Mather, A. S. (2004). Forest transition theory and the reforesting of Scotland . Scottish Geographical Journal, 120(1-2), 83-98.

England is similar: in the late 11th century, 15% of the country was forested, and over the following centuries two-thirds were cut down. By the 19th century the forest area was reduced to a third of what it once was. But it was then that England reached its transition point and since then, forests have doubled in size.

National Inventory of Woodland and Trees, England (2001). Forestry Commission. Available here .

This was first coined by Alexander Mather in the 1990s.Mather, A. S. (1990). Global forest resources . Belhaven Press.

This diagram is adapted from the work of Hosonuma et al. (2012).

Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., ... & Romijn, E. (2012). An assessment of deforestation and forest degradation drivers in developing countries . Environmental Research Letters , 7 (4), 044009.

Rudel, T. K. (1998). Is there a forest transition? Deforestation, reforestation, and development . Rural Sociology , 63 (4), 533-552.

Rudel, T. K., Coomes, O. T., Moran, E., Achard, F., Angelsen, A., Xu, J., & Lambin, E. (2005). Forest transitions: towards a global understanding of land use change . Global Environmental Change , 15 (1), 23-31.

Cuaresma, J. C., Danylo, O., Fritz, S., McCallum, I., Obersteiner, M., See, L., & Walsh, B. (2017). Economic development and forest cover: evidence from satellite data . Scientific Reports , 7 , 40678.

Noriko Hosonuma et al. (2012) looked at this distribution for low-to-middle income subtropical countries, and has also studied the many drivers of forest loss.Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., ... & Romijn, E. (2012). An assessment of deforestation and forest degradation drivers in developing countries . Environmental Research Letters , 7 (4), 044009.

Pendrill, F., Persson, U. M., Godar, J., & Kastner, T. (2019). Deforestation displaced: trade in forest-risk commodities and the prospects for a global forest transition . Environmental Research Letters , 14 (5), 055003.

Crowther, T. W., Glick, H. B., Covey, K. R., Bettigole, C., Maynard, D. S., Thomas, S. M., ... & Tuanmu, M. N. (2015). Mapping tree density at a global scale . Nature , 525 (7568), 201-205.

Curtis, P. G., Slay, C. M., Harris, N. L., Tyukavina, A., & Hansen, M. C. (2018). Classifying drivers of global forest loss . Science , 361 (6407), 1108-1111.

Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., ... & Romijn, E. (2012). An assessment of deforestation and forest degradation drivers in developing countries . Environmental Research Letters , 7(4), 044009.

Hosonuma et al. (2012) gathered this data from a range of sources including country submissions as part of their REDD+ readiness activities, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) country profiles, UNFCCC national communications and scientific studies.

Scheffers, B. R., Joppa, L. N., Pimm, S. L., & Laurance, W. F. (2012). What we know and don’t know about Earth's missing biodiversity . Trends in Ecology & Evolution , 27(9), 501-510.

Maxwell, S. L., Fuller, R. A., Brooks, T. M., & Watson, J. E. (2016). Biodiversity: The ravages of guns, nets and bulldozers . Nature, 536(7615), 143.

Lewis, S. L. (2006). Tropical forests and the changing earth system . Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences , 361(1465), 195-210.

Tyukavina, A., Hansen, M. C., Potapov, P. V., Stehman, S. V., Smith-Rodriguez, K., Okpa, C., & Aguilar, R. (2017). Types and rates of forest disturbance in Brazilian Legal Amazon, 2000–2013 . Science Advances , 3 (4), e1601047.

Lewis, S. L., Edwards, D. P., & Galbraith, D. (2015). Increasing human dominance of tropical forests . Science , 349 (6250), 827-832.

If we sum countries’ imported deforestation by World Bank income group , we find that high-income countries were responsible for 40% of imported deforestation; upper-middle income for 25%; lower-middle income for 20%; and low income for 5%.

We then get high-income countries' share of deforestation as: [40% of the 29% that is traded], which is equal to 12%.

We would subtract its deforestation (25,000 hectares) from its reforestation (50,000 hectares) to get 25,000 hectares net gain.

Data on the annual change in domestic forests is sourced from the UN FAO’s Forest Resources Assessment .

To do this, they quantified where deforestation was occurring due to the expansion of croplands, pasture and tree plantations (for logging), and what commodities were produced on this converted land. Then, using a physical trade model across 191 countries and around 400 food and forestry products, they could trace them through to where they are physically consumed, either as food or in industrial processes.

Pendrill, F., Persson, U. M., Godar, J., Kastner, T., Moran, D., Schmidt, S., & Wood, R. (2019). Agricultural and forestry trade drives large share of tropical deforestation emissions . Global Environmental Change , 56 , 1-10.

In 2012 – the mid-year of this period – global emissions from fossil fuels, industry and land use change was 40.2 billion tonnes. Deforestation was therefore responsible for [2.6 / 40.2 * 100 = 6.5%].

The carbon footprint of diets across the EU vary from country-to-country, and estimates vary depending on how much land use change is factored into these figures. Notarnicola et al. (2017) estimate that the average EU diet, excluding deforestation, is responsible for 0.5 tonnes CO 2 per person. If we add 0.3 tonnes to this figure, deforestation would account for around one-sixth [0.3 / (1.5+0.3) * 100 = 17%].

Notarnicola, B., Tassielli, G., Renzulli, P. A., Castellani, V., & Sala, S. (2017). Environmental impacts of food consumption in Europe . Journal of Cleaner Production , 140 , 753-765.

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Can Technology Rescue Our Forests Before It’s Too Late?

Cloud computing is doing its part to fight climate change by creating solutions to deforestation.

By Chase Guttman

By Chase Guttman May 17, 2023

Forests are life. Not only for flora and fauna – 80% of terrestrial animals, plants and insects live in them, according to the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) – but also for people, more than 2.5 billion of whom depend on forests and forest products for food, water or work, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) .

Trees also are one of the last lines of defense in the fight against global climate change. We must find solutions to deforestation in order to support a vital part of our climate fight. 

“Trees are without a doubt the best carbon capture technology in the world. When they perform photosynthesis, they pull carbon dioxide out of the air, bind it up in sugar and release oxygen,” forestry educators Melissa Kreye and Calvin Norman explained in an article for Penn State Extension , the extension program at The Pennsylvania State University.

Unfortunately, trees are disappearing at record rates. Illegal logging and land grabbing in areas of the rainforest threaten long-standing untouched forests. In a February 2023 report , satellite images show a loss of 30,000 football fields worth of destruction in a single month in Brazil — the worst February for deforestation on record. Although forests cover 31% of the planet, WWF says the tropics alone are losing nearly 30 soccer fields’ worth of trees every single minute. Worldwide between 2002-2019, an average of 8.3 million acres of forest – an area larger than Belgium – disappear every year, according to Conservation International . At that rate, the British newspaper The Guardian conjectures that rainforests may vanish altogether within the next century. 

Why Are Forests Important

According to recent statistics compiled by Lawnstarter for The State of Forests and Forestry , the problem is accelerating in certain parts of the world. Every year 10 million hectares of forest are lost, 80,000 acres of forest are lost every day, 15 billion trees are cut down each year, and 50,000 species disappear.

Tackling Climate Change Challenges with Cloud Computing

solution to problem of deforestation

In late February 2023, the Department of Agriculture announced a nearly $10 million investment in forest nursery and native seed partnerships. Funding for these reforestation efforts comes from the Biden-Harris Bipartisan Infrastructure Law. These investments complement the recently announced $35 million investment in Forest Service nurseries in support of the National Forest System Reforestation Strategy . 

If humanity wants to slow rising temperatures, it must find solutions to deforestation, which accounts for up to 15% of global carbon emissions, Reuters reports.

To do so, conservationists are relying on something even more powerful than bulldozers: cloud computing, which they’re utilizing to quantify, combat and counteract deforestation around the world.

Saving Forests with Satellites

Tech-based solutions like drone photography , remote sensors and satellite imagery help protect the priceless forests that are still standing. By analyzing it, conservationists can monitor land changes over time, thereby identifying deforestation so they can intervene in order to stop it.

There’s just one problem: The proliferation of satellites has created too much of a good thing. NASA satellites , for example, have captured one image per season of every place on Earth for the past 49 years. The result is more than 50 trillion pixels of data.

“Entities looking to track and prevent deforestation are faced with vast and growing amounts of unstructured data that are practically impossible to manage,” IBM reported in a 2021 case study about the use of technology by conservationists.

Can Cloud-Based Farming Make Agriculture More Sustainable?

solution to problem of deforestation

To turn data volume from a handicap into an upper hand, companies like IBM are using cloud-based artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms to process satellite imagery quickly and efficiently.

“Filtering large amounts of data can be slow, labor-intensive and expensive,” Adriana Erthal Abdenur, co-founder and executive director of Brazilian climate institute Plataforma CIPÓ, wrote in an article for the Global Conservatory .

“Some of the most promising innovations for enhancing the monitoring of forests involve artificial intelligence and associated technologies, such as deep learning and machine learning. AI can enhance the accuracy of forest monitoring, can help make forest data more reliable, can speed the data analysis process exponentially and can build up local capacity for forest monitoring. Some of the innovations entail attempts to predict where deforestation will occur.”

Spotting Elephants from Space Using Deep Learning

solution to problem of deforestation

An early AI innovator in the area of forest management was Google, which in 2013 published a groundbreaking map illustrating how Earth’s forests had changed between 2000 and 2013. Produced in partnership with geographers at the University of Maryland, it was created using machine learning algorithms that analyzed 700,000 publicly available images from NASA’s Landsat series of Earth-observing satellites. On a single computer, the analysis would have taken 15 years. Because the work was spread across 10,000 different computers using the cloud, however, it took only a few days.

“In the past, I used to bring data to my computer and analyze it … Now it’s impossible to bring all the data to my computer,” Landsat scientist Jeff Masek told the NASA Earth Observatory in a 2015 article . 

“With distributed and cloud computing] we can implement our algorithms where the data live. It’s a different way of mining the Landsat archive.”

NASA Wants to Keep Skies Safe as Drone Traffic Skyrockets

solution to problem of deforestation

The online forest monitoring platform Global Forest Watch builds on Google’s and NASA’s work by using software to analyze satellite imagery and detect when precious trees have disappeared.

“We can actually see these little patches that indicate where there’s been removal of a single tree,” Mikaela Weisse, who helps run the site, told NPR . 

“If we can detect deforestation and other changes as soon as they’re happening, then there’s the possibility to send in law enforcement ... to stop it before it goes further.”

For years, scientists have used remote sensing to acquire data and study physical, chemical and biological impacts on the environment in order to find solutions to problems like deforestation. Now, they can tap into on-demand networks of cloud-connected sensors—including satellites in space, drones in the air and field-based wireless sensors on the ground—that collect environmental observations and measurements in real time.

Sustainable Supply Chains

Satellite imagery and machine learning can empower not only conservationists but also corporations.

Again, Google is leading the way. In September 2020, it announced a partnership with consumer packaged goods company Unilever to help end deforestation within its enormous supply chain.

Trucking and Logistics Company Goes and Grows with Hybrid Cloud

solution to problem of deforestation

“By combining the power of cloud computing with Google Earth’s ability to map the planet by satellite imagery, we’ll be able to store and make sense of huge amounts of complex data, and gain insights into any impact on local environments and communities,” explained Unilever , which owns brands like Axe, Ben & Jerry’s and Dove.

“Not only will this lead to greater accountability in our supply chain, it will also help us to better detect deforestation and prioritize any areas of forests or habitats in need of urgent protection.”

Unilever is hoping to find solutions to deforestation within its supply chain by 2023  The company is using lessons from this process to help other enterprises do the same within their own logistics networks.

“This collaboration with Google Cloud will take us to the next level in sustainable sourcing,” said Dave Ingram, Unilever’s chief procurement officer. 

“We will now be able to process and combine complex sets of data like never before. The combination of these sustainability insights with our commercial sourcing information is a significant step-change in transparency, which is crucial to better protect and regenerate nature.”

How Virtual Power Plants Can Solve the Energy Crisis Safely and Sustainably

solution to problem of deforestation

Adds Rob Enslin, president of cloud sales at Google, “Together, we’re demonstrating how technology can be a powerful tool in aiding businesses who strive to protect the Earth’s resources. It will require collective action to drive meaningful change, and we are committed to doing our part.”

From Deforestation to Re-forestation Solutions

Environmentalists are tackling deforestation with cloud-based data of all types at their fingertips – not just satellite imagery. Rainforest Connection , for example, is addressing illegal deforestation in real time with an acoustic monitoring system that uses cell phones strategically placed throughout the rainforest to detect the sound of chainsaws.

And then there are drones, which technologists are harnessing to reverse deforestation and mitigate its harmful impacts.

solution to problem of deforestation

Take Dendra Systems , which is arming drones with “seed missiles” in an effort to plant trees and restore greenery to regions leveled by deforestation. In Myanmar, its flying robots provide air support in an otherwise back-breaking manual effort to repopulate the Earth with essential flora.

Drones Help Feed the World

solution to problem of deforestation

“The drones first fly over an area to map it, collecting data about the topography and soil condition that can be combined with satellite data and analyzed to determine the best locations to plant each seed. Then the drone fires biodegradable pods – filled with a germinated seed and nutrients – into the ground,” Fast Company reported. “Two operators working with 10 drones can theoretically plant 400,000 trees in a day.”

These tree-planting drones are more time- and cost-effective than human labor and can access hard-to-reach areas with limited effort and safety risks. By leveraging cloud and edge computin g, which are easily scalable, Dendra and its nonprofit partners hope to plant millions of more trees in the coming years.

“By now, we have all recognized the urgency of climate change and the impact of global land degradation – from frequent flooding, costly wildfires, deforestation and the loss of biodiversity devastating ecosystems across the world. We need hands across all industries to fight back if we are going to make a dent on climate change and it starts with restoring our degraded ecosystems and lands,” Dendra CEO Susan Graham said in a 2020 press release .

Between monitoring deforestation and mitigating it, cloud-based technologies might be the key to success.

“AI can help prevent at least some of the environmental disasters we are currently witnessing,” the Global Conservatory asserts.

It can do so by ensuring that when a tree falls in the forest, people can not only hear it, but also do something about it.

Can Technology Rescue Our Forests Before It’s Too Late?

This is an updated version of the original article published on December 9, 2021.

Chase Guttman is a technology and travel writer. He’s also an award-winning travel photographer, drone cinematographer, author, lecturer and instructor. His book, The Handbook of Drone Photography, was one of the first written on the topic and received critical acclaim. Find him at chaseguttman.com or @chaseguttman .

© 2023 Nutanix, Inc. All rights reserved. For additional legal information, please go here.

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solution to problem of deforestation

How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

solution to problem of deforestation

Imagine if France, Germany, and Spain were completely blanketed in forests — and then all those trees were quickly chopped down. That’s nearly the amount of deforestation that occurred globally between 2001 and 2020, with profound consequences.

Deforestation is a major contributor to climate change, producing between 6 and 17 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, according to a 2009 study. Meanwhile, because trees also absorb carbon dioxide, removing it from the atmosphere, they help keep the Earth cooler. And climate change aside, forests protect biodiversity.

“Climate change and biodiversity make this a global problem, not a local problem,” says MIT economist Ben Olken. “Deciding to cut down trees or not has huge implications for the world.”

But deforestation is often financially profitable, so it continues at a rapid rate. Researchers can now measure this trend closely: In the last quarter-century, satellite-based technology has led to a paradigm change in charting deforestation. New deforestation datasets, based on the Landsat satellites, for instance, track forest change since 2000 with resolution at 30 meters, while many other products now offer frequent imaging at close resolution.

“Part of this revolution in measurement is accuracy, and the other part is coverage,” says Clare Balboni, an assistant professor of economics at the London School of Economics (LSE). “On-site observation is very expensive and logistically challenging, and you’re talking about case studies. These satellite-based data sets just open up opportunities to see deforestation at scale, systematically, across the globe.”

Balboni and Olken have now helped write a new paper providing a road map for thinking about this crisis. The open-access article, “ The Economics of Tropical Deforestation ,” appears this month in the Annual Review of Economics . The co-authors are Balboni, a former MIT faculty member; Aaron Berman, a PhD candidate in MIT’s Department of Economics; Robin Burgess, an LSE professor; and Olken, MIT’s Jane Berkowitz Carlton and Dennis William Carlton Professor of Microeconomics. Balboni and Olken have also conducted primary research in this area, along with Burgess.

So, how can the world tackle deforestation? It starts with understanding the problem.

Replacing forests with farms

Several decades ago, some thinkers, including the famous MIT economist Paul Samuelson in the 1970s, built models to study forests as a renewable resource; Samuelson calculated the “maximum sustained yield” at which a forest could be cleared while being regrown. These frameworks were designed to think about tree farms or the U.S. national forest system, where a fraction of trees would be cut each year, and then new trees would be grown over time to take their place.

But deforestation today, particularly in tropical areas, often looks very different, and forest regeneration is not common.

Indeed, as Balboni and Olken emphasize, deforestation is now rampant partly because the profits from chopping down trees come not just from timber, but from replacing forests with agriculture. In Brazil, deforestation has increased along with agricultural prices; in Indonesia, clearing trees accelerated as the global price of palm oil went up, leading companies to replace forests with palm tree orchards.

All this tree-clearing creates a familiar situation: The globally shared costs of climate change from deforestation are “externalities,” as economists say, imposed on everyone else by the people removing forest land. It is akin to a company that pollutes into a river, affecting the water quality of residents.

“Economics has changed the way it thinks about this over the last 50 years, and two things are central,” Olken says. “The relevance of global externalities is very important, and the conceptualization of alternate land uses is very important.” This also means traditional forest-management guidance about regrowth is not enough. With the economic dynamics in mind, which policies might work, and why?

The search for solutions

As Balboni and Olken note, economists often recommend “Pigouvian” taxes (named after the British economist Arthur Pigou) in these cases, levied against people imposing externalities on others. And yet, it can be hard to identify who is doing the deforesting.

Instead of taxing people for clearing forests, governments can pay people to keep forests intact. The UN uses Payments for Environmental Services (PES) as part of its REDD+ (Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and forest Degradation) program. However, it is similarly tough to identify the optimal landowners to subsidize, and these payments may not match the quick cash-in of deforestation. A 2017 study in Uganda showed PES reduced deforestation somewhat; a 2022 study in Indonesia found no reduction; another 2022 study, in Brazil, showed again that some forest protection resulted.

“There’s mixed evidence from many of these [studies],” Balboni says. These policies, she notes, must reach people who would otherwise clear forests, and a key question is, “How can we assess their success compared to what would have happened anyway?”

Some places have tried cash transfer programs for larger populations. In Indonesia, a 2020 study found such subsidies reduced deforestation near villages by 30 percent. But in Mexico, a similar program meant more people could afford milk and meat, again creating demand for more agriculture and thus leading to more forest-clearing.

At this point, it might seem that laws simply banning deforestation in key areas would work best — indeed, about 16 percent of the world’s land overall is protected in some way. Yet the dynamics of protection are tricky. Even with protected areas in place, there is still “leakage” of deforestation into other regions. 

Still more approaches exist, including “nonstate agreements,” such as the Amazon Soy Moratorium in Brazil, in which grain traders pledged not to buy soy from deforested lands, and reduced deforestation without “leakage.”

Also, intriguingly, a 2008 policy change in the Brazilian Amazon made agricultural credit harder to obtain by requiring recipients to comply with environmental and land registration rules. The result? Deforestation dropped by up to 60 percent over nearly a decade. 

Politics and pulp

Overall, Balboni and Olken observe, beyond “externalities,” two major challenges exist. One, it is often unclear who holds property rights in forests. In these circumstances, deforestation seems to increase. Two, deforestation is subject to political battles.

For instance, as economist Bard Harstad of Stanford University has observed, environmental lobbying is asymmetric. Balboni and Olken write: “The conservationist lobby must pay the government in perpetuity … while the deforestation-oriented lobby need pay only once to deforest in the present.” And political instability leads to more deforestation because “the current administration places lower value on future conservation payments.”

Even so, national political measures can work. In the Amazon from 2001 to 2005, Brazilian deforestation rates were three to four times higher than on similar land across the border, but that imbalance vanished once the country passed conservation measures in 2006. However, deforestation ramped up again after a 2014 change in government. Looking at particular monitoring approaches, a study of Brazil’s satellite-based Real-Time System for Detection of Deforestation (DETER), launched in 2004, suggests that a 50 percent annual increase in its use in municipalities created a 25 percent reduction in deforestation from 2006 to 2016.

How precisely politics matters may depend on the context. In a 2021 paper, Balboni and Olken (with three colleagues) found that deforestation actually decreased around elections in Indonesia. Conversely, in Brazil, one study found that deforestation rates were 8 to 10 percent higher where mayors were running for re-election between 2002 and 2012, suggesting incumbents had deforestation industry support.

“The research there is aiming to understand what the political economy drivers are,” Olken says, “with the idea that if you understand those things, reform in those countries is more likely.”

Looking ahead, Balboni and Olken also suggest that new research estimating the value of intact forest land intact could influence public debates. And while many scholars have studied deforestation in Brazil and Indonesia, fewer have examined the Democratic Republic of Congo, another deforestation leader, and sub-Saharan Africa.

Deforestation is an ongoing crisis. But thanks to satellites and many recent studies, experts know vastly more about the problem than they did a decade or two ago, and with an economics toolkit, can evaluate the incentives and dynamics at play.

“To the extent that there’s ambuiguity across different contexts with different findings, part of the point of our review piece is to draw out common themes — the important considerations in determining which policy levers can [work] in different circumstances,” Balboni says. “That’s a fast-evolving area. We don’t have all the answers, but part of the process is bringing together growing evidence about [everything] that affects how successful those choices can be.”

Green Coast

A Complete Guide to the Causes, Effects, and Solutions to Deforestation

Our forests are disappearing at an alarming rate. Can these deforestation solutions make a difference?

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Causes, effects and solutions to deforestation

Forests are critical to the survival of our planet and the species that occupy it for many reasons. Aside from providing important resources and natural habitats, forests purify our air and water and protect against climate change.

Despite the role that forests play in our planet’s ecosystems, we continue to lose more and more forest cover every year.

As little as 10,000 years ago , 71% of the Earth’s surface was covered by forests, shrubs, and wild grasslands. Only around 38% of this greenery still exists today, and it’s estimated that 10 million hectares of forest are cut down each year.

The main culprit for these tremendous losses? Deforestation; the clearing of forested land. Forests are cleared to make space for urbanization , agricultural processes, and to obtain wood for fuel, manufacturing, and construction purposes.

To better understand the devastating impacts and potential steps forward, this article will fully examine the causes, effects, and solutions to deforestation.

What are the main causes of deforestation?

Though most forests are cleared to make room for agricultural expansion, some of the other main causes of deforestation might surprise you.

1. Agricultural expansion

Agricultural activities are responsible for at least 80% of tropical rainforest deforestation. Whether local subsistence farmers or large-scale commercial agricultural operations, forests are being cleared around the world to keep up with soaring human populations.

According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations , large-scale commercial agriculture – primarily cattle ranching and cultivation of soya bean and oil palm – accounted for 40% of tropical deforestation between 2000 and 2010, and local subsistence agriculture for another 33%.

Deforestation in Malaysian Borneo due to palm oil plantation

In more recent years, Earth lost about 4.2 million hectares of humid tropical primary forest, an area about the size of the Netherlands. Nearly half of this loss was due to food production, mostly of commodity crops.

Ecologists warn that this commodity-driven deforestation is permanently changing the landscape: these areas will most likely never be forests again, as opposed to forests cleared by wildfires and forestry management (that grow back over time).

Our forests are home to valuable nutrients, but when they are cleared for agriculture, these nutrients are lost and farmers cannot benefit from them. 

Forests are also cleared for cattle ranching: around 80% of deforestation occurs to make space for cattle to graze. When this land is cleared, it’s unlikely it will be a forest again.

2. Climate change

Climate change is considered both a cause and effect of deforestation. 

It’s widely accepted that climate change is causing more and more extreme weather events and abnormal temperatures, which increase the chances of drought, wildfires, and flooding.

These extreme weather events severely damage forests, and they are only getting more severe as climate change worsens. Climate change will continue as deforestation does, as lost forests release more and more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In addition, there is much more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere than existing forests can successfully absorb.

Despite our increasingly digitized world, we still rely heavily on wood for paper, firewood, and a plethora of household furniture and products. Trees are cut down to produce these items, as well as to build commercial and residential structures.

While it is possible to harvest timber sustainably , illegal logging activities usually don’t follow these techniques. Illegal logging has become a huge cause of deforestation, as more and more individuals cut down trees illegally to support themselves financially.

signs of illegal timber logging

Between August 2003 and 2004 , an area of 26,130 square kilometers – around the size of Belgium – in the Amazon rainforest was destroyed, most of it illegally. Today, it is estimated that around 60-80% of logging in the Amazon is illegal .

The U.S. Agency of International Development estimates that the illegal timber industry is worth $51-152 billion each year . This massive operation not only damages our environment but also prevents local communities from legally benefitting from forests for food and economic security.

Mining extraction and processing efforts around the world indirectly and directly damage almost all areas of the environment, and forests are no exception. The construction, operation, maintenance, and extraction of raw materials from the Earth requires the clearing of large amounts of land.

In a 2022 study, it was found that 3,264 square kilometers or 326,400 hectares of forest was directly lost due to industrial mining, with 80% occurring in only four countries: Indonesia, Brazil, Ghana, and Suriname.

an open pit mine in the forest

Mining caused indirect forest loss in two-thirds of the countries investigated in the study. The building of infrastructure for mineral processing, storage, and transportation is one of the ways that mining indirectly causes deforestation.

The long-term impacts of mining on the Earth’s forests is unknown , but as long as the global population continues to expand, the demand for mineral resources will continue to rise. And, unless deforestation solutions are implemented, our forests and environment will continue to pay the price.

5. Urbanization and population growth

The global human population is projected to reach 9.7 billion in 2050 , and potentially peak at nearly 10.4 billion in the mid-2080s. Today, 55% of the world’s population lives in urban areas, and this proportion is expected to rise to 68% by 2050.

This rapid growth has negative implications for all areas of our environment, from increased air and water pollution to the destruction of our forests to grow food and produce resources. Forests are also cleared to make room for urban development and growing cities.

Global demand for food and resources leads to increasing deforestation rates. 

Even in areas where the population is low, external forces such as demand for timber or cattle in other parts of the country or world can lead to deforestation in these areas.

Deforestation is also not exclusive to undeveloped countries: an individual in an industrialized country is likely to consume 60 times more of the world’s resources than an individual in a less industrialized nation.

Addressing this particular cause of deforestation is a complex undertaking because many areas around the world are continuing to expand and industrialize.

What are the harmful effects of deforestation?

Deforestation harms our planet in several ways. From environmental to social and economic impacts, we are already seeing the consequences of the loss of our Earth’s forests.

1. Climate change

The loss of forests around the world is fuelling the ever-growing climate crisis in indirect and direct ways.

3 key ways that deforestation directly leads to climate change according to The Rainforest Alliance :

  • Trees naturally absorb and store carbon dioxide. When they are cut down, we lose them as resources in keeping excess carbon out of the atmosphere.
  • Even more emissions are released when felled trees release the carbon they’d been storing, and rot or burn on the forest floor.
  • Livestock and fields for crops most often replace forests, emitting large amounts of even more greenhouse gasses. Taken together, these emissions account for a quarter of all emissions worldwide.

Trees act as filters for the water we drink and the air we breathe, meaning that the less trees cover the Earth, the more susceptible our resources are to pollution.

As a by-product of photosynthesis, oxygen is produced and released by trees. It’s estimated that one large tree can provide a day’s supply of oxygen for up to four people.

In one year, a mature tree will absorb more than 48 pounds of harmful carbon dioxide through photosynthesis and release oxygen in exchange.

Trees help protect water quality by capturing, storing, and using rainfall. Trees reduce the amount of runoff that carries pollution off of the landscape and into nearby rivers and lakes. This process also decreases the rate and volume of stormwater flowing through local storm sewers.

With the loss of our nutrient-rich forests, air and water pollution are causing more harm to our communities.

2. Loss of biodiversity

Forests are home to more than three-quarters of the world’s life on land, meaning that they are incredibly biodiverse. Biodiversity is essential to all life on Earth: without a wide range of animals, plants and microorganisms, our interconnected ecosystem cannot continue to provide us with the air and food we all require.

Forest biological diversity refers to all forms of life within forested areas and the ecological roles they perform. According to the United Nations Environment Programme , forests contain:

  • 60,000 different tree species
  • 80% of the world’s amphibian species
  • 75% of the world’s bird species
  • 68% of the world’s mammal species

When forest ecosystems are damaged, these species are all put at risk. Animals are forced to flee and seek new habitats that may not be best suited for them, and plant species become more and more endangered. Today, more than 1,400 tree species are critically endangered and in urgent need of conservation action.

Deforestation critically threatens that plant and animal species, and in turn, us as humans, that rely on forest ecosystems to provide critical biodiversity for our entire planet.

3. Soil erosion and desertification

Clearing forests and other vegetation causes soil erosion, which is when soil is removed or eroded from its original position. Deforestation leads to increased soil erosion because when trees and plants are removed, their roots no longer hold the earth in place, leaving the underlying soil vulnerable to water and wind.

When soil is covered with vegetation, its organic matter is continually being replenished as leaves, fruits, and animal droppings fall to the ground and are broken down by microorganisms. In the absence of trees, soil composition is changed over time and made even more vulnerable to erosion as its organic matter is depleted.

soil desertification

Deforestation also plays a part in an advanced form of land degradation known as desertification. Desertification occurs when the biological state of land is destroyed or greatly damaged, resulting in desert-like conditions that make it difficult to support life.

The expansion of agricultural lands, deforestation, and overgrazing of animals on land can lead to desertification. These activities negatively affect soil’s ability to retain water and nutrients .

Thus, deforestation renders our soil more susceptible to damage that makes our land less able to support vegetation and crops and leads to increased water pollution .

4. Social and economic disparity

Aside from permanently damaging the landscape of our planet, deforestation impacts human livelihoods and wellbeing.

Surprising facts about human-forest interaction

  • Approximately 750 million people , including 60 million Indigenous people, live in forests.
  • Forests provide more than 86 million green jobs.
  • An estimated 880 million people spend part of their time collecting fuelwood or producing charcoal. 
  • Over 90% of people living in extreme poverty are dependent on forests for at least part of their livelihoods.

Communities that reside in forests rely directly on the biodiversity of forests to support themselves, whether using products derived from the forest for food, shelter, energy, medicine, and income. Wood and other forest products provide an estimated 20% of income for rural households in developing countries with access to forests.

Deforestation poses a threat to the livelihoods of millions of people, as forests are clearly interconnected with social and economic activities in both developing and developed nations. The continued loss of forests puts millions of people in jeopardy.

What are the solutions to deforestation?

Though the effects of deforestation are incredibly dire, there are several actions that both individuals and corporations, agencies, and governments can take to preserve the health of our world’s forests.

1. Sustainable agriculture

Sustainable agricultural practices are helping combat the alarming rates of deforestation caused by agriculture around the world and helping restore the productivity of degraded lands.

Agroforestry is one example of such practice: agroforestry is the intentional integration of trees and shrubs into crop and animal farming systems. Integrating trees with crop and animal farming leads to several benefits:

  • Trees planted on farms can help connect forest fragments, benefitting migratory animal species.
  • Shady trees can help improve the health of soil.
  • A canopy of trees regulates the temperature and humidity of crops.
  • Fruit-bearing trees can provide extra sources of income for farmers.

maize and chestnuts in agroforestry

In the U.S., there are five widely recognized categories of agroforestry:

  • forest farming
  • alley cropping
  • silvopasture
  • riparian forest buffers

These methods all aim to produce more sustainable animal and crop farming operations.

Integrating trees with farming is a more sustainable alternative to razing forests for agricultural lands. By opting for more sustainable agricultural practices, farmers don’t need to jeopardize the state of our forests.

2. Reforestation

Reforestation is the process of planting new trees in a previously-forested area that has been deforested or destroyed by natural disasters like wildfires, drought, and disease.

As the U.S. Forest Service explains , reforestation requires complex land management decisions that ensure the efforts take place at the right time and with the right tree species for a given area.

reforested area

This solution can be implemented by planning for the natural regeneration of a forest, or by planting trees, saplings, or seeds. Accelerating the development of forests on deforested land is critical to protecting our communities , soil, and resources for years to come. 

3. Making more sustainable choices

Although many solutions to deforestation involve government agencies and corporations, there are several steps that individuals can take to help combat the loss of our precious forested ecosystems.

Here are just some of the ways you can help combat deforestation rates around the world:

  • Adopting healthier diets and consuming less meat.
  • Recycling and reusing discarded material to reduce the demand for raw wood materials.
  • Purchase certified sustainably sourced wood products and avoid buying tree-sourced products altogether.
  • Plant native species of trees.
  • Educate yourself and others on deforestation.
  • Support forest conservation organizations such as the Rainforest Action Network , the World Wildlife Fund , The Sierra Club , and others.  

Over time, these greener choices will help make a difference in the harmful effects of deforestation.  

4. Laws and regulations

Organizations are calling for stricter and more expansive regulations that require companies to source timber sustainably and crack down on illegal logging operations. Significant investment can also incentivize farmers to adopt more sustainable farming practices.

Illegal logging, one of the main causes of deforestation around the world, is oftentimes a result of weak governance and corruption in countries that produce timber. Consumer countries have also failed to ban the import of illegally-logged timber, allowing for continued damage to be done to our forests.

In 2022, the European Union passed a law that requires companies to ensure that a series of products sold in the EU do not come from deforested land anywhere in the world. While this type of legislative action discourages companies from buying illegally-logged timber or supporting deforestation efforts, more concrete action must be taken.

5. Protecting the forests we have

Overall, the best solution to deforestation is to halt or greatly reduce the destruction of forests around the world. 

Forest conservation also plays a crucial role in combating deforestation. Conservation efforts in forests aim to preserve all natural resources found within a forest and the benefits derived from forests, as well as plant and maintain newly-forested areas.

coniferous forest

Forest conservation efforts are complex and differ depending on the forest. Protecting an existing forest from illegal logging may be all that is required in some cases, whereas vulnerable newly-planted forests need to be protected against changing weather and climate conditions.

When extracted, timber should be sourced from well-managed forests and organizations like The Forest Stewardship Council (FSC). The FSC is a world leader in sustainable forest management and operates the most rigorous and trusted forest certification system that ensures forests are managed sustainably.

Wrap up on the causes, effects, and solutions to deforestation

Forests are not only some of the most biologically diverse ecosystems on our planet, they also are interconnected with our communities, atmosphere, and waterways in critical ways.

Now that we’ve examined the causes, effects, and solutions to deforestation, it’s clear that to destroy our forests means putting plant and animal species at risk and causing economic disparity among the people that rely on forests for their survival.

However, you can do your part by advocating for our Earth’s forests and continuing to understand the complex issue of deforestation.

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About Sustainability, & Related Topics & Issues

Deforestation: Causes, Sources, Rates, Effects, & Solutions

Deforestation: Causes, Sources, Rates, Effects, & Solutions

Deforestation can have a range of effects on humans and wildlife.

In this guide, we discuss what deforestation is, what causes it, where it occurs the most, rates of deforestation, the effects and problems, potential solutions, and how many trees we might really need on Earth .

We also look into reforestation and afforestation.

Summary – Deforestation

What is deforestation.

Deforestation might be described as the permanent removal of trees classified to be part of a ‘forest’, and/or the clearing of that forest land and turning it into land for non forest use (farming, ranches, logging etc.)

Main Causes Of Deforestation

Deforestation happens for a number of reasons

The main direct human cause of deforestation is the clearing of land for the purposes of both agriculture, and farming (subsistence farming is responsible for 48% of deforestation and commercial agriculture is responsible for 32%). This makes up around 80% of total deforestation

Logging, and using wood for fuel fall in behind them.

In some parts of the world, temperate rainforests are heavily logged for their timber

Rainforests in particular can be cut down in some regions for economic reasons, and it can also be due in part to corporate advancement or because of the decision making of those in power

There are a number of other direct and indirect reasons deforestation may occur

A significant driver behind human causes of deforestation come down to the economic value of the new converted land use compared to the value of the forest, and also, the ability to produce resources (in the case of farming and agriculture)

There can also be natural causes of deforestation, such as forest fires, hurricanes, and other natural events

Effects Of Deforestation

Some of the side effects of deforestation may include but aren’t limited to:

Biodiversity loss of animals and plant life (and microorganisms and other life found in forests) – along with soils and the world’s oceans , forest and rainforests have some of the highest concentrations of biodiversity on Earth

Land degradation and top soil erosion (topsoil takes up to a millenia to naturally replenish)

Loss of biosequestration of carbon from the atmosphere and loss of oxygen production (assuming there is no re-afforestation)

And, richer countries benefiting whilst people (mainly local populations that depend on the rainforest for their livelihood) from poorer countries and local communities may lose part of their livelihood

Tree Cover On Earth Now vs The Past

Interestingly, some sources indicate we have more total tree cover on Earth now than 35 years ago, but tropical rainforests specifically are being depleted.

This might be seen as a significant issue because of how rich the biodiversity is in rainforests

Total Tree Area vs Tree Density

There is a difference between total tree area, and tree density

These two measurements should be distinct from each other

Total tree area considers the total area of tree cover, whereas tree density considers how many trees there are within a square area space

Some tree cover areas have low density, whilst some have much higher density

The Importance Of Tropical Tree Cover (Rainforests)

Tropical tree cover loss has been increasing continuously since 2001 according to some reports

So, tropical rainforest deforestation is a significant issue , and should be a distinction separate to temperate rainforest deforestation

Reversible vs Irreversible Effects Of Deforestation

The thing about tropical rainforest deforestation to note is that, some side effects such as species extinction are almost or completely irreversible, and, it takes a very long time to restore rainforests – that’s even if they can be restored at all. 

Countries With The Most Forest Area

Some of the countries with the most forest area right now might include Russia, Canada, Brazil, United States, China, and Australia

Countries With The Highest Deforestation Rates

Some of the countries with the highest deforestation rates right now might include Brazil, Indonesia, Russia, Mexico, Papua New Guinea, Peru, The US, Bolivia, Sudan, and Nigeria

Global Reforestation Rates

Globally, reforestation rates still appear to be lagging (as of right now) behind deforestation rates

Potential Challenges With Tree Replanting & Using Trees As Part Of Land Restoration

Something to note is that there can be challenges and issues with mass tree planting and afforestation projects (as evidenced in China as one example) – so, these challenges and potential problems need to be considered with any future tree planting projects and strategies

Similarly, it there can be challenges to using trees as part of land restoration and re-greening strategies

Potential Solutions To Deforestation

Solutions to deforestation ( and saving rainforests ) might include but aren’t limited to:

Providing an economic incentive to preserve remaining forests as they are

Establishing new forest areas (along with tree planting, reforestation and re-greening of land )

Considering the impact of indirect factors like population growth and increased consumer needs on the need for new farming land and increased agricultural production

Finding other alternatives to timber (like bamboo as one example) is another option worth considering 

Deforestation involves:

– The permanent removal of an area of trees classified as a ‘forest’

– And, this removal or trees is to convert the land use to something else other than for a forest (such as for farms, ranches, or urban use)

What Is Cleared Forest Land Used For?

There can be a number of land conversion types and new land uses such as:

– Agriculture and farming

This is the main cause and land conversion use of deforestation according to various sources (subsistence farming, and commercial agriculture, together, are responsible for up to 80% of deforestation by humans)

The land can be converted into pasture for livestock, or cropland (for farms, ranches, etc)

It can also be converted to palm and pulp plantations, and other types of plantations

Oil palm tree plantations are linked to deforestation in some countries

The forest area is cleared for a logging operation where the trees are cut down to be used for products or materials such as timber, wood for construction, paper, and even for wood fuel (sometimes in the form of charcoal or timber)

– A mining site

To mine or quarry minerals, soils, stones, etc

– Infrastructure

Such as dams and roads

– Other urban development

Main Causes Of Deforestation (Human Causes)

Based on stats, farming and agriculture land use conversions seem to be the most common reason for deforestation (together – about 80% of total deforestation), with logging and using wood for fuel a reasonable % difference behind them.

According to Wikipedia.org:

– Subsistence farming is responsible for 48% of deforestation

– Commercial agriculture is responsible for 32%

– Logging is responsible for 14%

– Fuel wood removals make up 5%.

Other Humans Causes Of Deforestation

Other direct, and indirect causes of deforestation may include:

– The calculated or real economic value of the new/converted land use being more than the current forest land area, or the value of any forest management/conservation land use

– A lack of protection laws and regulations in place to protect forests and forest land area

– Corruption of government institutions

– Countries, companies and organizations using their wealth and power to control forest land and resources (over groups with less wealth and power)

– Population growth, overpopulation , and increasing demand and consumption rates whereby more resources are needed

– Urbanization and spread of urban development (in part to cater to growing populations)

– Globalization (although, there are ways that globalization has also help protect and conserve forests, so, it can be both a positive and a negative)

– Deforestation has also been used in the past as a war strategy

In places like West Africa and the Ivory Coast, the clearing of tropical forests is in part due to cocoa production for chocolate .

Natural Causes Of Deforestation

Sometimes causes of deforestation are caused my nature and not humans.

These natural causes can include:

– Hurricanes, bushfires, floods, and other natural events

Effects Of Deforestation, & Subsequent Problems

In general, trees and forests are some of the more important plant life on Earth for humans and society .

Trees in particular provide a range of potential benefits and serve a range of potential functions in the ecosystems they are a part of .

But, there can be a number of individual effects and flow on problems from deforestation.

Some of the effects and problems caused by deforestation (with and without reforestation) might include:

– Habitat damage

Wildlife live in the trees and forest ecosystems that are removed.

– Biodiversity loss and wildlife loss

Biodiversity is lost due to deforestation in a number of ways.

Wildlife live in the trees and forest ecosystem, which is removed. In this instance, there is either a displacement of wild animal species, or extinction is also a possibility.

Plants and vegetation also live in the forest ecosystem that is removed.

There’s also microorganisms to consider.

From rainforests.mongabay.com: ‘Tropical rainforests support the greatest diversity of living organisms on Earth … rainforests house more than 50 percent of all plants and animals found on land’

From worldwildlife.org: ‘Forests are home to 80% of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity. These ecosystems are complex webs of organisms that include plants, animals, fungi and bacteria … [and] The most biologically diverse and complex forests on earth are tropical rainforests’

– Land and soil degradation 

Soil erosion, and other land degradation issues such as desertification, and land and soil aridity

One side effect of deforestation can be that it can remove the top hummus and leaf litter layer that protects the fertile soil below it. 

– Decreased oxygen production

Assuming there is no reafforestation elsewhere, there will be lower amounts of oxygen being released into the atmosphere ( trees and forest help produce oxygen )

– Decreased carbon dioxide absorption

Assuming there is no reafforestation elsewhere, there will be lower amounts of biosequestration of atmospheric carbon dioxide from the atmosphere

– Increase in GHG emissions

Various sources indicate that deforestation is one of the causes of increased GHG emissions …

In the last two decades, various studies estimate that land use change, including deforestation and forest degradation, accounts for 12-29% of global greenhouse gas emissions (wikipedia.org).

In addition, when trees are removed, the soil they sit upon is disturbed and releases CO2. Soils are capable of holding three times as much carbon as the atmosphere (theconversation.com)

– Impact on local communities

Local communities in low income or isolated areas can be impacted by the clearing of forests that they depend on for their livelihood 

– Other effects

Tropical rainforests are the source of one-fourth of the medicines humans use – so, when they are cleared, we may lose access to some of these medicines

The Wikipedia resource in the resources list has more discussion on effects of deforestation.

How Much Of Earth’s Land Is Forest?

About 30 percent of Earth’s land surface is covered by forests (Wikipedia.org)

It’s worth noting though that there are different types of forests, and each forest area has different characteristics and features, as well as conditions.

How Much Of The Earth’s Land Surface Is Tropical Rainforest?

… they cover less than 2 percent of Earth’s surface (rainforests.mongabay.com)

So, we can see tropical rainforests make up a small % of total forest land area on Earth.

Countries With The Most Total Forest Area

You can read more about countries with the most forests at:

List of countries by forest area (wikipedia.org) 

The world’s most forested countries (worldatlas.com) 

A summarized top 6 list includes:

United States

Countries With the Highest Deforestation Rates (Total Woodland Area Lost)

You can read more about deforestation rates at:

Worst countries for deforestation by woodland area loss (worldatlas.com) 

Deforestation by region (wikipedia.org)

General Deforestation Guide (wikipedia.org)

A top 10 list includes:

Papua New Guinea

As of 2005, net deforestation rates have ceased to increase in countries with a per capita GDP of at least US$4,600 (wikipedia.org)

Is Deforestation Increasing Or Decreasing? (Based On Annual Stats & Numbers) 

The numbers may suggest we have more trees and mor total tree cover, but tropical tree cover and savanna tree cover might be decreasing.

This could be an issue, as these tend to be some of the more biodiverse forest ecosystems.

Explained in a more detailed way:

– We have more total tree cover (tropical areas + subtropical, temperate, boreal, and polar regions) on Earth than 35 years ago

– … Earth may presently have more trees than 35 years ago … but, some of its most productive and biodiverse biomes—especially tropical forests and savannas—are significantly more damaged and degraded, reducing their resilience and capacity to afford ecosystem services

– … tropical tree cover loss has been increasing continuously since 2001 (this is important to note because tropical rainforests are some of the most biodiverse ecosystems on Earth)

Although there some uncertainties around the rates of deforestation and the stats provided, it might be accurate to say that the evidence suggests that destruction of rainforests remains a significant environmental problem.

Some effects are irreversible, such as wildlife species loss.

It takes time to bring life back to forests once trees are replanted.

There is a difference between total tree area, and tree density in forests – so these indicators should be measured separately with reforestation.

As a result of deforestation, only 6.2 million square kilometres (2.4 million square miles) remain of the original 16 million square kilometres (6 million square miles) of forest that formerly covered the Earth (wikipedia.org)

You can read more about deforestation stats year by year in the globalforestwatch.org, and psmag.com resources mentioned in the resources list.

We’ve put together a separate guide that lists potential sustainable forest management practices .

However, to reduce deforestation, the following is a list of options that might be considered:

– Consider how the economic incentive to conserve rainforests can be increased

… use direct monetary incentives (or other types of incentives) to encourage developing countries to limit and/or roll back deforestation. This is done through several different types of programs …

– Consider farming and agricultural techniques based on forest conservation

New more sustainable methods of farming and agriculture such as food forests in permaculture

Read more about sustainable farming practices , and also the potential pros and cons of sustainable farming in these guides.

– Consider the impact and use of land rights

Some organisations suggest transferring land rights from the public domain to indigenous communities

– Consider better monitoring, tracking and reporting on deforestation

Monitoring deforestation via visual interpretation of aerial photos or satellite imagery, and hot spot analysis. 

Deforestation rate and total area deforested are two key stats used for example

– Forest management policies

Designing forest management policies to consider the short term and long term effects of deforestation

– Consider the impact of certifications

Having global certification systems … which contributes to tackling deforestation by creating market demand for timber from sustainably managed forests

– Consider reafforestation and tree planting to replenish forest ecosystems

Reforestation and afforestation large scale projects

Having world tree planting days like China has to replenish tree numbers [and maintaining these trees]

Increasing the number of planted forests (search engines like Ecosia are helping with these efforts)

– New forests

Establishing new forests in areas that are protected and we know won’t be cleared or disturbed/destroyed

– Consider product, service and material alternatives (other than those that come from deforestation)

Using bamboo and other alternatives instead of wood

– Have a specific focus on tropical rainforests and savannas

The most concentrated deforestation occurs in tropical rainforests.  

So, it makes sense to focus on tropical rainforests in particular if we want to decrease deforestation

This guide outlines some potential solutions to preserving rainforests

– Consider how globalization can be a tool to help with forest conservation and recovery

… there are cases in which the impacts of globalization (new flows of labor, capital, commodities, and ideas) have promoted localized forest recovery (wikipedia.org)

– Consider existing case studies on how certain countries have reduced or brought deforestation to zero

Costa Rico is one example of a country who brought deforestation to zero

Reforestation & Afforestation Rates & Information

It can be hard to find accurate reforestation rates.

Recently (over the last few years), there’s been some significant tree planting projects in various countries undertaken that have been individually reported.

Some stats on reforestation are:

By one measure the global reforestation rate between 1990 and 2005 was 2.5 million hectares a year, compared to 7 million to 8 million hectares a year destroyed by deforestation in that period.

In the 1990s, in another estimate, 14 millions hectares were lost a year to deforestation but 5.2 million hectares was gained through replanting for a net loss of 9.4 million hectares.

– factsanddetails.com

You can read more about reforestation and afforestation rates and numbers in these resources:

Top reforestation countries (statista.com)

India plants 50 million trees (nationalgeographic.com)

The largest ever tropical reforestation (fastcompany.com)

Reforestation guide  (wikipedia.org)

Afforestation guide (wikipedia.org)

Potential Issues With Tree Planting & Afforestation

Tree planting and afforestation sounds good in theory, but in practice, there are some challenges that need to be considered.

The same thing can be said for using trees as part of large land restoration & re-greening projects .

Potential problems and challenges to consider with tree planting are:

Whether monocultures are being planted, or mixed forests (be aware of ecological dead zones)

Whether native or non native species are being planted (non native species can become invasive)

Whether you are partnering with locals who are committed to the long term existence of trees and greenery (someone needs to ensure the trees survive) 

– ecosia.org

Whether there is enough water in the areas to sustainably support tree growth and tree life – trees must compete with the water needs of humans and other plant and animal life. [An example of this issue popping up is in China where Black locust plantations use up a significant portion of the available rainfall]

[So, water scarcity can become an issue]

– theconversation.com

How Many Trees Might We Need On Earth

This guide provides some information and data that might suggest how many trees we might need on Earth

1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation

2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reducing_emissions_from_deforestation_and_forest_degradation

3. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_forest_area

4. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/state-of-the-world-s-forest-the-most-wooded-countries-in-the-world.html

5. https://www.worldatlas.com/articles/worst-countries-for-deforestation-by-woodland-area-losses.html

6. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deforestation_by_region

7. https://www.statista.com/statistics/239438/top-reforestationcountries/

8. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reforestation

9. https://www.fastcompany.com/40481305/the-largest-ever-tropical-reforestation-is-planting-73-million-trees

10. https://news.nationalgeographic.com/2016/07/india-plants-50-million-trees-uttar-pradesh-reforestation/

11. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Afforestation

12. https://blog.globalforestwatch.org/data-and-research/2017-was-the-second-worst-year-on-record-for-tropical-tree-cover-loss

13. https://psmag.com/environment/the-planet-now-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago

14. http://factsanddetails.com/world/cat52/sub329/item1298.html

15. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/planet-earth-has-more-trees-than-it-did-35-years-ago/

16. https://blog.ecosia.org/everyone-getting-tree-planting-wrong/

17. http://theconversation.com/planting-trees-must-be-done-with-care-it-can-create-more-problems-than-it-addresses-128259

18. https://rainforests.mongabay.com/kids/elementary/201.html

19. https://www.worldwildlife.org/habitats/forest-habitat

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E&C

21 Causes, Effects and Solutions for Deforestation

“ Burn the forests if you will, but you will only scorch your own lungs.”

Anthony T. Hincks

Deforestation: Causes, Effects & Solutions

causes, effects and solutions for deforestation

Deforestation can be defined as the removal of a forest with the purpose of converting this land into non-forest use.

After deforestation, the land can now be used for ranches, farms or also for urban purposes.

There are several harmful effects of deforestation on the environmental system.

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For example, deforestation can cause a loss in biodiversity and can also indirectly contribute to the global warming problem.

Thus, it is crucial to preserve our forests, especially the rainforest.

In the following, the causes, effects as well as solutions to the deforestation problem will be examined.

Audio Lesson

Causes for deforestation, agriculture, desertification, urbanization.

  • Forest fires

One of the main reasons for deforestation is the worldwide increasing demand for meat and plants.

According to the UNFCCC, subsistence farming accounts for 48% of deforestation and commercial agriculture is responsible for 32% .

Farmers will often be able to earn much more by cutting down the trees and transforming the land into farmland than by conserving the forest.

Thus, farmers will even be tempted to burn down the forest in order to be able to monetize it.

This problem is especially prevalent in the rainforest.

Each year, there are several wildfires caused by humans who want to have more land for farming activities.

Logging is another big reason for deforestation.

We need wood for many different purposes in our daily lives.

Among others, it is used for the production of paper, furniture, firewood or also for the production of charcoal.

Thus, in order to meet this demand, it is profitable for landowners to cut down substantial amounts of their forest.

Many parts of land are used for industrial purposes.

These industries often do not care too much about the environment and dump their chemical by-products in rivers and forests which in turn can lead to the contamination and desertification of land.

Due to the desertification, this land will not be suitable to plant new trees anymore.

Due to population growth, more and more space is needed for the building of houses and the related infrastructure.

This also includes the construction of roads.

Thus, deforestation is one way to create more settlement space.

Forest Fires

Forest fires can be caused by either human activities or also by nature.

Forest fires can be a huge problem, especially in warm and dry periods of the year.

Large areas of forest and even lives can be lost due to uncontrolled wildfires.

Another reason for deforestation is the use of coal and oil mines.

Exploiting these natural resources can be very profitable.

However, in order to do this, large forest areas have to be cut down.

Moreover, the chemicals used for the extraction of the resources are often dumped into nature which results in contamination of large parts of the ecosystem.

solution to problem of deforestation

Effects of Deforestation

Effects on climate, effects on animals, effects on humans, loss of living space for indigenous tribes, loss of biodiversity, soil erosion, hydrological effects.

Deforestation is a severe cause of global warming since, after fossil fuel combustion, it is the second-largest anthropogenic source of carbon dioxide.

Carbon dioxide is produced in the burning of forest biomass and by the decomposition of plant material.

Forests are also a natural carbon sink.

Through photosynthesis, plants convert the carbon into sugar and oxygen.

The carbon is also stored in plants and trees.

Thus, burning these trees results in a release of carbon dioxide which in turn contributes to the global warming problem.

Deforestation has a significant adverse effect on animals since animals lose their natural habitat.

They either have to move in order to find a new home or they will die since they lose their food sources.

Thus, in the worst case, deforestation can even lead to the extinction of certain animals.

Humans are also affected by deforestation in several ways.

While there is an economical upside from deforestation for a small group of farmers, the majority of the world’s population will suffer due to the climate change issue.

There are some areas on our planet where people are still living in peace with their natural environment.

Especially in the Amazon Rainforest, there are several tribes that still live a quite original life without our western amenities.

These people rely on an intact environmental system since they still make their living from fishing or other nature-related activities.

However, as our greed for more land for housing and infrastructure purposes continues, more and more areas that had previously been used by indigenous people are now used for farming or industrial purposes.

This means that large areas of land are cut or burned down in order to get more land for farming purposes to make more money.

This also implies that the natural living space for the tribes is destroyed and that they may also lose their home.

Thus, deforestation can adversely impact the living conditions of many people.

Deforestation leads to vast decline in biodiversity .

It also causes the extinction of many species. Forests provide habitats for wildlife and also foster medicinal conservation.

About 80% of the world’s biodiversity is located in tropical rainforests .

This number shows the importance of the forest as medium to preserve the huge variety of species.

It was also found in a study that deforestation also destroys the microbial community which is responsible for the production of clean water, the removal of pollutants and for the recycling of nutrients.

A study of the Brazilian Amazon predicts that up to 90 percent of predicted extinctions will occur until the next 40 years.

Soil erosion can be another effect of deforestation.

Forests protect the soil from the sun and keep it moist.

By removing the trees, the soil is no longer protected and will dry out, which in turn can lead to soil erosion.

Deforestation also affects the water cycle.

Through their roots, trees extract groundwater and release it into the atmosphere.

The removal of trees thus contributes to a drier climate since it reduces the concentration of atmospheric moisture.

Trees are a natural storage of water.

They hold back large amounts of rainwater with their roots.

When the trees are removed, this natural water storage is gone and thus the vulnerability for floods increases dramatically.

solution to problem of deforestation

Solutions to the Deforestation Problem

Government regulations, convince farmers to avoid deforestation, reforestation and afforestation, international projects, change our consumption behavior, convince others.

In order to protect the forests, there have to be strict regulations on how much forest is allowed to be cut down and how much has to be preserved.

It is too tempting to cut down the forest and transform it to farmland.

Without regulation, the deforestation process will continue until there is not much forest left.

Farmers have to be convinced of the huge negative effects of deforestation on humanity.

Since farmers have a financial incentive for turning their forests into farmland, it should also be considered to subsidize them in a way that they have a financial incentive to protect their forests.

Reforestation can be defined as the restocking of existing forests and woodlands that have been depleted, afforestation refers to the planting of trees in areas where there has been no tree cover before.

Thus, either through reforestation or afforestation , another measure to meet the deforestation problem is to plant new trees.

However, it takes a quite long time until the trees have a significant size and impact on the climate.

There are several foundations that relate to the problem of deforestation and try to find solutions.

Founded in 1972, the Arbor Day Foundation is the largest nonprofit organization dedicated to the planting of trees.

The Billion Tree Campaign launched in 2006 also has the goal to plant as many trees as possible.

As of 2011, more than 12 billion trees have been planted due to the efforts of this organization.

At the end of 2017, the campaign was renamed in “Trillion tree campaign“.

Moreover, there is a project called the Amazon Fund which has the goal to raise money in order to monitor, combat and prevent deforestation.

Since the industrial revolution period, it is possible for humans to have high consumption levels which have never been possible before in the history of mankind.

Due to production with the support of machines, we are able to produce large quantities of goods with a low unit price.

This seems to be a good thing, but also has severe downsides.

One of them is that in order to be able to meet the increasing demand for material goods, more resources have to be extracted.

Moreover, more farming has to be done in order to meet the increasing demand for meat.

To provide all those resources, large areas of forests had been cut down.

This problem is especially severe in the Amazon Rainforest where farmers often start wildfires intentionally since they want to get more land for farming purposes since it is more profitable for them.

Therefore, to be able to stop the problem of deforestation, we have to change our consumption behavior.

For instance, this could mean not always buying the newest shit but rather keeping things that are still functional.

It could also mean to reduce meat consumption.

Thus, we can contribute in many different ways in our daily life behavior in order to mitigate the issue of deforestation.

Education is another crucial measure against deforestation and its implied problems for our earth.

Many people in our nowadays society do not know how important our forests really are for our planet and therefore also for the living quality of their children.

We have to make clear that forests are a vital part of the environment and that we have no chance to fight global warming if we continue to cut down large forest areas.

This education should start pretty early. It should already be taught in elementary school that we need our forests to survive as a species.

This education will likely have even more positive effects.

Since these educated children will tell their parents about the adverse consequences of deforestation and how we can prevent it, parents are more likely to also pay more attention to their daily behavior.

Moreover, when the educated children turn into grownups, they are more likely to behave in an environmentally friendly manner than children without this education.

As we have already seen, there are several measures that we can take in our daily life in order to prevent deforestation and the implied adverse consequences on the environmental system.

However, our contribution is only one part of the equation.

For really making an impact that matters, we have to convince our family, friends or also as many people as possible about the importance of saving our forests from deforestation.

If we are able to convince many people, these people will also convince other people, and so on.

In this way, we are able to make a huge impact on our society and will make a real contribution in order to mitigate the deforestation issue.

Deforestation is a big problem for humans and also for the whole ecosystem.

While it is quite profitable for certain small groups like farmers, deforestation is extremely harmful to the planet since it enhances global warming and also leads to the extinction of many species.

It also increases the likelihood of floods and other natural disasters .

Thus, we should make sure to stop the deforestation process on a global scale.

Famers should be encouraged to preserve their forests.

Governments have to strictly regulate the amount of deforestation to make sure that enough woodland remains untouched.

In conjunction with the other measures mentioned before, planting trees can be a supplementary measure to meet the deforestation problem.

https://www.redorbit.com/news/science/1112753888/amazon-deforestation-microbial-communities-122512/

http://www.rain-tree.com/facts.htm

http://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/background_publications_htmlpdf/application/pdf/pub_07_financial_flows.pdf

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ENCYCLOPEDIC ENTRY

Deforestation.

Deforestation is the intentional clearing of forested land.

Biology, Ecology, Conservation

Trees are cut down for timber, waiting to be transported and sold.

Photograph by Esemelwe

Trees are cut down for timber, waiting to be transported and sold.

Deforestation is the purposeful clearing of forested land. Throughout history and into modern times, forests have been razed to make space for agriculture and animal grazing, and to obtain wood for fuel, manufacturing, and construction.

Deforestation has greatly altered landscapes around the world. About 2,000 years ago, 80 percent of Western Europe was forested; today the figure is 34 percent. In North America, about half of the forests in the eastern part of the continent were cut down from the 1600s to the 1870s for timber and agriculture. China has lost great expanses of its forests over the past 4,000 years and now just over 20 percent of it is forested. Much of Earth’s farmland was once forests.

Today, the greatest amount of deforestation is occurring in tropical rainforests, aided by extensive road construction into regions that were once almost inaccessible. Building or upgrading roads into forests makes them more accessible for exploitation. Slash-and-burn agriculture is a big contributor to deforestation in the tropics. With this agricultural method, farmers burn large swaths of forest, allowing the ash to fertilize the land for crops. The land is only fertile for a few years, however, after which the farmers move on to repeat the process elsewhere. Tropical forests are also cleared to make way for logging, cattle ranching, and oil palm and rubber tree plantations.

Deforestation can result in more carbon dioxide being released into the atmosphere. That is because trees take in carbon dioxide from the air for photosynthesis , and carbon is locked chemically in their wood. When trees are burned, this carbon returns to the atmosphere as carbon dioxide . With fewer trees around to take in the carbon dioxide , this greenhouse gas accumulates in the atmosphere and accelerates global warming.

Deforestation also threatens the world’s biodiversity . Tropical forests are home to great numbers of animal and plant species. When forests are logged or burned, it can drive many of those species into extinction. Some scientists say we are already in the midst of a mass-extinction episode.

More immediately, the loss of trees from a forest can leave soil more prone to erosion . This causes the remaining plants to become more vulnerable to fire as the forest shifts from being a closed, moist environment to an open, dry one.

While deforestation can be permanent, this is not always the case. In North America, for example, forests in many areas are returning thanks to conservation efforts.

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A Collapse of the Amazon Could Be Coming ‘Faster Than We Thought’

A new study weighed a range of threats and variables in an effort to map out where the rainforest is most vulnerable.

A fire in a tropical-looking forest.  Flames are consuming grass in the foreground. In the background, dark smoke shrouds tall trees.

By Manuela Andreoni

Manuela Andreoni has reported extensively from the Brazilian and Ecuadorean regions of the Amazon rainforest.

Up to half of the Amazon rainforest could transform into grasslands or weakened ecosystems in the coming decades, a new study found, as climate change, deforestation and severe droughts like the one the region is currently experiencing damage huge areas beyond their ability to recover.

Those stresses in the most vulnerable parts of the rainforest could eventually drive the entire forest ecosystem, home to a tenth of the planet’s land species, into acute water stress and past a tipping point that would trigger a forest-wide collapse, researchers said.

While earlier studies have assessed the individual effects of climate change and deforestation on the rainforest, this peer-reviewed study, published on Wednesday in the journal Nature , is the first major research to focus on the cumulative effects of a range of threats.

“This study adds it all up to show how this tipping point is closer than other studies estimated,” said Carlos Nobre, an author of the study. Dr. Nobre is a Brazilian Earth systems scientist who studies how deforestation and climate change might permanently change the forest.

The study overlapped data on forest cover, temperature and rainfall patterns, and then factored in other variables that might make various sections of the forest more or less fragile, like the presence of roads or legal protections, to map out where the rainforest is most likely to transform.

The regional profiles that emerged showed that a tenth of the Amazon was highly vulnerable to transforming into grasslands or degraded ecosystems with lower tree cover. Another 47 percent of the forest has moderate potential to transform, they found, including mostly untouched areas that are more vulnerable to extreme droughts like the current one.

These changes could push the forest to a tipping point that would lead to the collapse of the whole forest ecosystem.

“We don’t really know when we are going to reach it,” said Bernardo Flores, a postdoctoral researcher at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and the lead author of the study. But, he added, as the drought that set in last year shows, “we are approaching it faster than we thought.”

Lincoln Muniz Alves, a climatologist at the National Institute for Space Research in Brazil who wasn’t involved in the study, said the study added to a growing body of knowledge about the forest’s resilience to the variety of challenges it faces. “The study makes progress in the understanding of the tipping point,” he said. “In general, previous scientific papers have mostly explored the impact of deforestation.”

Recent research has shown that parts of the forest in the southeast of the Amazon that have experienced large-scale deforestation and fires have already started emitting more carbon dioxide than they absorb because the rainforest there has been damaged past the point of recovery.

The collapse of part or all of the Amazon rainforest would release the equivalent of several years’ worth of global emissions, possibly as much as 20 years’ worth, into the atmosphere as its trees, which store vast amounts of carbon, are replaced by degraded ecosystems. And, because those same trees pump huge amounts of water into the atmosphere, their loss could also disturb global rainfall patterns and temperatures in ways that aren’t well understood.

The researchers also estimated the limits of what the forest could withstand in terms of various threats. Global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, deforestation should be kept below 10 percent of the original tree cover and the annual dry season cannot exceed five months for the forest to remain intact, the study found.

To that end, governments need to not only halt carbon emissions and deforestation, but also restore at least 5 percent of the rainforest, the study said.

“If you pass those thresholds, then the forest could, in principle, collapse or transition into different ecosystems,” Dr. Flores said. “There is probably one tipping point of the system that is shaped by the interaction of these different stressors.”

There are, however, still unknowns. Researchers don’t fully understand why some trees die after a drought while others don’t; different biodiversity profiles across regions make general conclusions tricky; and, crucially, scientists still don’t fully understand the complex interactions of factors like drought, deforestation and other threats.

Still, said Marina Hirota, a professor at the Federal University of Santa Catarina and another author of the paper, governments shouldn’t wait for more clarity to act. “Sometimes science takes a little bit longer to really inform what we need,” Dr. Hirota said. “Are we going to wait and see, and blame uncertainty for not doing anything?”

Raymond Zhong contributed reporting.

Manuela Andreoni is a Times climate and environmental reporter and a writer for the Climate Forward newsletter. More about Manuela Andreoni

Learn More About Climate Change

Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small .

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Carbon-free electricity has never been more plentiful, but it hasn’t yet been enough to reduce reliance on fossil fuels. We looked at how electricity generation has changed over time to help you understand today’s global picture .

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  • Environmental Chemistry
  • Deforestation

Deforestation Process

What is deforestation.

Deforestation can be defined as the large-scale removal of trees from forests (or other lands) for the facilitation of human activities. It is a serious environmental concern since it can result in the loss of biodiversity, damage to natural habitats, disturbances in the water cycle , and soil erosion. Deforestation is also a contributor to climate change and global warming.

Table of Content

Why are forests important, the data behind deforestation, causes of deforestation, how does deforestation affect the environment, other effects of deforestation, how can deforestation be controlled, recommended video.

solution to problem of deforestation

  • Forests combat climate change by absorbing greenhouse gases (such as carbon dioxide) and acting as a carbon storehouse.
  • They are a source of oxygen, food, clean water, and medicine.
  • They play a vital role in the water cycle – they work to add water to the atmosphere via the process of transpiration.
  • Forests help mitigate the disastrous effects of floods by acting as a floodwater sink. Therefore, deforestation also increases the vulnerability of the landmass to certain natural calamities.
  • The large mass of trees in forest areas combats soil erosion by providing mechanical support to the soil.
  • Forests are home to over 50% of all known species on the planet. They account for over 80% of the land-based biodiversity. Globally, forests are home to approximately 30,00,00,000 human beings.
  • They are also a source of raw material for many commercially important products such as paper, wood, and fabric.
  • Approximately 1.6 billion jobs are forest-dependent. Forests also account for approximately 1% of the world’s GDP (gross domestic product).
  • Forests cover approximately 31% of the total land surface of the Earth.
  • Tropical forests harbour over half of all land-based animal and plant species in the world.
  • Between the years 2000 and 2012, over 568 million acres of forest have been claimed by deforestation.
  • Approximately 9 million acres of virgin tropical forest were cut down in the year 2018.
  • The Amazon rainforest, which is the source of 20% of the world’s oxygen supply, loses approximately 1.32 acres of its area every minute due to deforestation.

What are the Human Activities that Cause Deforestation?

The primary anthropogenic activities (human activities) that contribute to deforestation include:

  • Agriculture – small-scale and large-scale farming
  • Logging – cutting of trees for use as raw material
  • Mining and urban expansion – clearing of forest area for the construction of infrastructure.

According to the secretariat of the UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change), agriculture is the root cause of 80% of deforestation. Logging accounts for another 14% and the cutting of trees for use as wood fuel account for 5%. A pie-chart detailing the driving cause of the deforestation of tropical forests between the years 2000 and 2005 is provided below.

Causes of Deforestation

Slash-and-burn agriculture is one of the most destructive forms of agriculture that results in large-scale deforestation. It involves the burning of a large area of forest land and the subsequent plantation of crops in the same soil (which is now fertilized by the ashes of the burnt trees). Despite the practice being abandoned by several developed countries, it is still followed in some Southeast Asian countries.

What are the Secondary Factors that Contribute to Deforestation?

Illegal logging, which accounts for approximately 80% of all logging activities, involves the harvesting and sale of timber in violation of the law. Corrupt government officials may accept bribes from illegal loggers and offer access to protected forest areas in return. Therefore, corruption can be viewed as an indirect cause of deforestation.

Overpopulation and population growth increase the requirement for several resources such as food and infrastructure. These requirements can, directly or indirectly, result in deforestation. For example, a huge explosion in the population of a city can result in the deforestation of the surrounding area for:

  • The construction of homes and other buildings.
  • Agriculture (to meet the increased demand for food).
  • The construction of roads, dams, and other infrastructure.

Military conflicts among humans can also result in deforestation. For example, the U.S. military made extensive use of Agent Orange (a defoliant that causes the leaves of trees to wither and fall off) during the Vietnam War (1955 – 1975).

Can Deforestation Occur due to Natural Causes?

In some relatively rare cases, the deforestation of forest areas can be traced to natural causes. For example, volcanic eruptions can burn away the forest lands surrounding the volcano. Other examples of natural deforestation include:

  • Destruction of forests due to hurricanes, floods, and other natural calamities.
  • Invasion of the forest ecosystem by parasites that destroy trees.
  • Forest fires are sparked by lightning and other natural phenomena.

It is important to note that natural factors have a very small stake in the overall deforestation of the Earth’s land surface (anthropogenic factors account for almost all of it).

Increased Carbon Dioxide Levels in the Atmosphere

Forests serve as a carbon sink by absorbing atmospheric carbon dioxide during photosynthesis . Since carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas, deforestation is a direct contributor to the greenhouse effect and (consequently) global warming .

Apart from being responsible for allowing gaseous carbon dioxide to linger in the atmosphere, deforestation also contributes to increased carbon dioxide emissions. The CO 2 emissions caused by deforestation account for approximately 12% of all anthropogenic carbon dioxide emissions.

Deforestation and the Water Cycle

  • Since trees play a vital role in the water cycle, deforestation can contribute to significant disturbances in it.
  • Trees and plants regulate the moisture content in the atmosphere via the process of transpiration (they absorb groundwater through their roots and release it into the atmosphere from their leaves and flowers).
  • Also, their roots burrow into the soil and create macropores in it. These macropores allow water to penetrate deeper into the soil, thereby increasing the water-holding capacity of the soil.
  • Dead plant material (such as leaves and twigs) that fall to the surface of the ground impart several properties to the soil, such as increased water-holding capacity.
  • Approximately 30% of the world’s freshwater supply can be sourced from tropical rainforests.
  • Deforestation is accompanied by reduced humidity, owing to the absence of transpiring trees. The water content in the soil and the groundwater levels also decline in the cleared land.
  • It is not uncommon for deforested land to experience extremely arid climates. In fact, deforestation has been linked to desertification and droughts.

Soil Erosion as a Consequence of Deforestation

Trees tend to bind their roots to the soil bedrock, thereby reinforcing the soil. Additionally, the plant litter generated by trees offers protection to the surface of the soil. In the absence of trees (as a consequence of deforestation), the soil becomes vulnerable to erosion.

Deforestation of sloped lands is often accompanied by landslides, which can be explained by the loss of soil adhesion due to the absence of trees. The extent of erosion is amplified by certain natural calamities such as floods (note that the plant litter found on forest surfaces helps reduce the amount of soil washed away).

Since soil erosion is a direct contributor to eutrophication , deforestation can be viewed as a contributor to other environmental concerns.

Effects of Deforestation on Biodiversity

Forests play host to a wide spectrum of wildlife. In fact, tropical rainforests are believed to be the most diverse ecosystems on the planet. Deforestation poses a grave threat to this biodiversity. On a local scale, the clearing of forest land can cause a decline in the population of certain species. On a global scale, however, deforestation can result in the extinction of several desirable species.

Approximately 50,000 species (consisting of plants, animals, and insects) are lost every year as a consequence of deforestation. Studies suggest that over 40% of all plant and animal species in the Southeast Asian region will undergo extinction over the course of the 21 st century.

The implications of large-scale biodiversity loss are difficult to predict, but it is highly probable that it would have an adverse effect on the food web . Also, the extinction of one species may play a leading role in the extinction of another via the phenomenon of co-extinction.

How Does Deforestation Affect the Economy?

  • Deforestation facilitates the generation of raw materials for a wide range of industries. Examples include the agriculture industry, the wood industry, and the construction industry.
  • However, the overexploitation of wood and timber can have a negative impact on the economy. The short-term economic gains made from deforestation are accompanied by reduced long-term productivity.
  • For example, overenthusiastic timber harvesting from a forest area may increase the overall output temporarily, but the declining forest area will eventually cause the harvest to decline. The overall forest output is greatly reduced by such practices.
  • According to some reports, the global GDP may see a 7% decline by the year 2050 due to deforestation and other factors.
  • Therefore, a sustainable approach to the usage of forest resources is ideal for the economy.

Deforestation and Human Health

Deforestation can, directly or indirectly, provide a channel for the propagation of many infectious diseases . Since deforestation is often accompanied by the loss of indigenous species, it is not uncommon for new species to flourish in deforested lands.

In Malaysia, the geographic shift of the fruit bat population (as a consequence of deforestation) facilitated the transmission of the Nipah virus. Fruit bats, which are known to be vectors of the disease, lost their natural habitat due to deforestation and started feeding in the orchards surrounding habited areas. Through proximity, the Nipah virus spread from fruit bats to pigs, and then to humans.

Increased soil erosion (due to deforestation) can result in the formation of pools of stagnant water. These pools serve as breeding grounds for mosquitoes, which are vectors of several deadly diseases such as malaria and yellow fever. Some theories also suggest that deforestation has contributed to the propagation of the human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) .

Role of Governments and other Administrative Authorities

The following strategies can be implemented by governments to combat deforestation:

  • Implementation of security measures and strict laws to prevent illegal logging.
  • Increasing the count and range of forests under government protection.
  • Carefully planning the construction of infrastructure (roads, dams, etc.) in order to minimize the loss of forest area.
  • Investing in new technologies in the agricultural industry (such as hydroponics) and helping farmers implement eco-friendly agricultural practices (such as cyclic agriculture).
  • Optimizing the management of forests by banning inefficient agricultural practices (such as slash-and-burn agriculture).
  • Facilitating the production and use of wood alternatives to reduce the demand for timber. For example, bamboo can serve as an alternative to wood fuel.
  • Launching new reforestation campaigns to restore deforested lands.
  • Investing in forest plantations – forests planted with high yielding trees can offer 5 – 10 times the output (per hectare) of a natural forest.

Role of Individuals

Every human on the planet shares the responsibility of preserving its resources (for other humans, other species, and for future generations). An individual can contribute to the prevention of deforestation by implementing the 3R (Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle) principle in their daily lives.

  • Reduce – Reducing the amount of paper consumed by using alternatives wherever possible.
  • Reuse – Avoid use-and-throw products to prevent wastage.
  • Recycle – Diligently recycle all used wood and paper products.

Individuals can also combat deforestation by spreading awareness about its negative consequences and participating in tree-planting campaigns.

To learn more about deforestation and other important environmental concerns (such as soil pollution ), register with BYJU’S and download the mobile application on your smartphone.

Frequently Asked Questions – FAQs

What are the key causes of deforestation, what are the environmental effects of deforestation, how can deforestation affect the water cycle, how can i as an individual help reduce deforestation.

The following practices can be incorporated to reduce the demand for forest products:

  • Going paperless and using digital media wherever possible (using digital receipts, preferring the use of E-mails instead of letters).
  • Purchasing only recyclable products and recycling them once used.
  • Purchasing only certified wood products and supporting the organizations that are fighting deforestation.
  • Educating other individuals about deforestation and its negative impact on the environment.

How does deforestation affect biodiversity?

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Global warming, deforestation, fires combined could hasten Amazon demise, study finds

River affected by the drought in Iranduba

Reporting by Oliver Griffin; Editing by Will Dunham

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Oliver reports on energy and the environment as well as general news from Bogotá in Colombia. He has a special interest in reporting on Colombia's rampant oil crime, where hydrocarbon theft fueled by the drug trade leads to widespread pollution. He previously worked at Dow Jones Newswires in Barcelona where he covered oil and mining.

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Parts of Amazon rainforest could tip toward collapse by 2050, study warns

solution to problem of deforestation

By 2050, up to 47 percent of the Amazon could hit critical ecological tipping points, researchers say , transitioning into savanna grasslands or other degraded ecosystems because of deforestation and human-driven global warming.

This could mean the large-scale collapse of a biome that has for 65 million years has served as the Earth’s carbon sink, absorbing billions of tons of carbon while largely weathering changes in climate.

A study published Wednesday in the journal Nature says that by 2050, 10 percent to 47 percent of the forest is expected to reach critical thresholds for warming temperatures, extreme droughts, deforestation and fires. The ensuing ecosystem transitions could expedite global warming by releasing stored carbon into the atmosphere, the researchers write.

“At the end of this process, our planet will reorganize itself, find a new equilibrium,” Bernardo M. Flores, the lead author of the study, said in an email. But “humans and other species will have to readapt to very unpleasant conditions,” such as “unbearable aridity” or higher temperatures, he added.

The peer-reviewed study is the first comprehensive look that combines several metrics to document the Amazon’s degradation.

The study’s authors list five critical thresholds, or tipping points, that shouldn’t be passed, including keeping global warming to under 2 degrees Celsius, or 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit, compared with preindustrial levels (one of the goals outlined in the 2015 Paris agreement ), keeping annual rainfall in the Amazon above 1,000 millimeters and containing deforestation to 20 percent.

The study’s authors, though, recommended stricter thresholds that they refer to as “safe” boundaries: 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit), 1,800 millimeters of annual rainfall and deforestation levels of under 10 percent.

“When a forest reaches a tipping point, it becomes much more difficult, if not impossible, to control the variables that cause it to transition,” Flores said. The result is a degraded ecosystem with less resources for local populations, less rainfall and more greenhouse gas, he said. Humans must reduce global warming and end deforestation of the Amazon to prevent this, he said.

Greenland is losing more ice than we thought. Here’s what it means for our oceans.

The Amazon rainforest has long had a net cooling effect on the planet, by a process scientists call evapotranspiration . Amazon water near the Atlantic coast evaporates into the air, floating inland before becoming rainfall. That same moisture evaporates again, and floats farther inland before repeating the process, spreading water deeper and deeper throughout the Amazon.

The Amazon contains up to 200 billion metric tons of carbon, the equivalent of 15 to 20 years of global emissions.

But the Amazon’s ability to function as a natural shield against global warming has been gradually diminishing because of repeated droughts and higher temperatures caused by human activities such as logging, cattle ranching and fires.

About 17 percent of what remains of the Amazon today “has been degraded by human disturbances,” the authors write. When including the impact of recent, repeated droughts, about 38 percent of the rainforest may have been degraded, they added.

The Amazon was struck by droughts in 2005, 2010, 2015, 2016, 2020 and last year, The Post reported . The pace of big droughts has accelerated from once every 20 years to two per decade.

Erica Fleishman, the director of the Oregon Climate Change Research Institute at Oregon State University and who was not involved in the study, said the recent paper “effectively highlights that the interaction of climate change and land use can have ecological effects” that are substantial and enduring, although not necessarily catastrophic or irreversible.

The Amazon’s destruction will likely hurt the forest’s ability “to sequester carbon and mitigate global climate change,” she said in an email.

To slow or reverse this trend, South American governments must reduce deforestation and promote restoration in degraded areas, especially in Brazil, the authors wrote. “Up to one-third of the total annual rainfall in Amazonian territories of Bolivia, Peru, Colombia and Ecuador depends on water originating from Brazil’s portion of the Amazon forest.”

Carlos Nobre, one of the study’s authors and an Earth system scientist at the University of São Paulo’s Institute of Advanced Studies in Brazil, was among the first academics in the early 1990s to suggest that the Amazon would reach a tipping point, and transform into a degraded ecosystem, resembling a vast pasture.

In an email, Nobre said that he is becoming increasingly confident that Brazil and its neighbors will eliminate deforestation by 2030, pointing to slowing deforestation last year documented by Brazil’s government and the Amazon Conservation Association , a D.C. advocacy group.

“We have to get to zero deforestation and degradation very soon, and it seems we are going in that direction,” he said.

But Nobre and Noah Diffenbaugh, a professor of Earth system science at Stanford University who wasn’t involved in the study, expressed concern about humans successfully keeping temperatures under 1.5 degrees Celsius, referring to how 2023’s temperatures teetered near the threshold.

“Given that we have just had a single year at 1.5 degrees C[elsius] and annual emissions of greenhouse gases remain high, there is a real risk that long-term global warming exceeds that boundary,” Diffenbaugh said in an email.

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solution to problem of deforestation

IMAGES

  1. Solutions to Deforestation That Make Perfect Sense

    solution to problem of deforestation

  2. 10 Deforestation Solutions to Save The Amazon

    solution to problem of deforestation

  3. Deforestation Solutions that can Help Combat Climate Change

    solution to problem of deforestation

  4. 8 Fantastic Solutions to Deforestation

    solution to problem of deforestation

  5. 5 proactive ways to stop deforestation

    solution to problem of deforestation

  6. Solutions to Deforestation That Make Perfect Sense

    solution to problem of deforestation

COMMENTS

  1. 6 Solutions to Deforestation and What You Can Do

    1. Reduce Consumption (A Major Cause of Deforestation) Reducing consumption reducing the demand for resources that causes deforestation. (Foto: CC0 Public Domain / Unsplash - roya ann miller) Overconsumption is one of the biggest causes of deforestation.

  2. Solutions to Deforestation

    Stop #TreeWashing. Oppose the Trillion Trees Act! add your name Working to end deforestation and forest degradation while helping to restore lost forests is our best chance to solve the climate emergency, protect wildlife, and defend the rights of Indigenous Peoples and traditional local communities.

  3. Environment: What can we do to stop deforestation?

    Environment: What can we do to stop deforestation? | World Economic Forum In 2014, governments, companies, NGOs and Indigenous groups committed to a series of goals to protect forests, but in 2020, we're further from meeting them than we were six years ago.

  4. Why deforestation matters—and what we can do to stop it

    Environment Reference Why deforestation matters—and what we can do to stop it Large scale destruction of trees—deforestation—affects ecosystems, climate, and even increases risk for zoonotic...

  5. How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

    Vital forest is cleared every day, with major climate effects. Satellites have revolutionized measurement of the problem, but what can we do about it? | MIT News September 19, 2023

  6. How Can We Stop Deforestation?

    World Population Consumer Economy Global Challenges How Can We Stop Deforestation? Discover how to stop deforestation and protect our planet. Learn impactful actions for individuals, communities, and governments. The World Counts • Impact through Awareness Insights • Facts • Figures • Live Statistics Visit our shop 586,343.67

  7. Five workable solutions to deforestation

    1. Enfranchise local people Having profited from deforestation in their own lands, industrialised nations - with the benefit of hindsight - are now dictating what people in developing nations can and can't do with their own woodlands.

  8. Saving the Amazon rainforest

    1. The sovereignty of the Amazon is untouchable The countries of the Amazon region have sovereign rights over their territories and natural resources. These are legal rights that can't be challenged by nations outside the Amazon.

  9. Deforestation and Forest Degradation

    Adopt an Orangutan Overview © Nigel Dickinson / WWF-Canon Forests cover nearly one-third of the land area on our planet and are home to most of the world's life on land. They are also essential to human health , purifying our water and air and serving as our first line of defense against new infectious diseases.

  10. 15 Strategies to Reduce Deforestation

    1. Plant a tree 2. Use less paper 3. Recycle paper and cardboard 4. Use recycled products 5. Buy only sustainable wood products 6. Don't buy products containing palm oil 7. Reduce meat consumption 8. Do not burn firewood excessively 9. Practice eco-forestry 10. Raise awareness 11. Respect the rights of indigenous people

  11. Global Warming Solutions: Stop Deforestation

    Protecting forests helps to fight global warming, protect biodiversity, and promote sustainable development. Tropical deforestation accounts for about 10 percent of the world's heat-trapping emissions — equivalent to the annual tailpipe emissions of 600 million average U.S. cars. Reducing tropical deforestation can significantly lower ...

  12. Deforestation

    Amazon $ 19.99 "Deforestation, clearance, clearcutting or clearing is the removal of a forest or stand of trees from land which is then converted to a non-forest use. Deforestation can involve conversion of forest land to farms, ranches, or urban use. The most concentrated deforestation occurs in tropical rainforests ."

  13. 8 Fantastic Solutions to Deforestation

    Some of the fantastic solutions to deforestation include: Table of contents 1. Green Business Green business concerns re-use and recycling. Green methods of production and utilization of resources can immeasurably reduce deforestation. Particularly, it's the focus on re-using items, reducing the use of artificial items, and recycling more items.

  14. Report Finds Successful Efforts to Reduce Deforestation

    BONN, Germany (June 05, 2014) - Programs and policies to reduce tropical deforestation, and the global warming emissions resulting from deforestation, are seeing broad success in 17 countries across four continents, according to a new report from the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS). The report, " Deforestation Success Stories: Tropical ...

  15. Causes of Tropical Forests Loss and How to Conserve Them

    New narratives, new leadership could accelerate action on deforestation. 2022 was the first year following the ambitious Glasgow Leaders Declaration signed by 145 heads of state at the UN climate summit (COP26) in 2021, promising to halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.. The Declaration was accompanied by a suite of commitments, including those from public sector donors and private ...

  16. Deforestation and Forest Loss

    Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. Can we bring it to an end? Since the end of the last great ice age - 10,000 years ago - the world has lost one-third of its forests. 5 Two billion hectares of forest - an area twice the size of the United States - has been cleared to grow crops, raise livestock, and use for fuelwood. In a previous post we looked at this change in global forests ...

  17. Tech Solutions to Deforestation: Tree Planting Drones and More

    Saving Forests with Satellites. Tech-based solutions like drone photography, remote sensors and satellite imagery help protect the priceless forests that are still standing. By analyzing it, conservationists can monitor land changes over time, thereby identifying deforestation so they can intervene in order to stop it.

  18. How to tackle the global deforestation crisis

    MIT News Office How to tackle the global deforestation crisis Vital forest is cleared every day, with major climate effects. Satellites have revolutionized measurement of the problem, but what can we do about it? Peter Dizikes | MIT News September 19, 2023 Image: iStock

  19. Causes, Effects and Solutions to Deforestation

    Overall, the best solution to deforestation is to halt or greatly reduce the destruction of forests around the world. Forest conservation also plays a crucial role in combating deforestation. Conservation efforts in forests aim to preserve all natural resources found within a forest and the benefits derived from forests, as well as plant and ...

  20. Deforestation: Causes, Sources, Rates, Effects, & Solutions

    Some of the effects and problems caused by deforestation (with and without reforestation) might include: - Habitat damage. Wildlife live in the trees and forest ecosystems that are removed. - Biodiversity loss and wildlife loss. Biodiversity is lost due to deforestation in a number of ways.

  21. 21 Causes, Effects and Solutions for Deforestation

    Desertification Urbanization Forest fires Mining Agriculture One of the main reasons for deforestation is the worldwide increasing demand for meat and plants. According to the UNFCCC, subsistence farming accounts for 48% of deforestation and commercial agriculture is responsible for 32%.

  22. Deforestation

    Article Vocabulary Deforestation is the purposeful clearing of forested land. Throughout history and into modern times, forests have been razed to make space for agriculture and animal grazing, and to obtain wood for fuel, manufacturing, and construction. Deforestation has greatly altered landscapes around the world.

  23. A Collapse of the Amazon Could Be Coming 'Faster Than We Thought'

    Global warming should not exceed 1.5 degrees Celsius, deforestation should be kept below 10 percent of the original tree cover and the annual dry season cannot exceed five months for the forest to ...

  24. The Amazon has survived changes in the climate for 65 million years

    The Amazon has proven resilient to natural changes in the climate for 65 million years, but deforestation and the human-caused climate crisis have brought new levels of stress and could cause a ...

  25. Deforestation

    Deforestation can be defined as the large-scale removal of trees from forests (or other lands) for the facilitation of human activities. It is a serious environmental concern since it can result in the loss of biodiversity, damage to natural habitats, disturbances in the water cycle, and soil erosion.

  26. Global warming, deforestation, fires combined could hasten Amazon

    Deforestation is exacerbating the risk, with fewer trees generating moisture that rains back down to nourish the forest. Already, about 18% of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed, according ...

  27. Parts of Amazon rainforest could reach tipping point by 2050, study

    By 2050, up to 47 percent of the Amazon could hit critical ecological tipping points, researchers say, transitioning into savanna grasslands or other degraded ecosystems because of deforestation ...