The planet lost a record amount of forests last year, largely because of fires that raged around the world, data shows.
Loss of pristine rainforests alone reached 6.7 million hectares (16.5 million acres) in 2024, nearly twice as much as in 2023, researchers at the University of Maryland and the World Resources Institute said in an annual update of the state of the world’s forests.
The world lost the equivalent of 18 soccer fields of forested land every minute, the researchers estimated.
For the first time since record-keeping began, fires, not agriculture, were the leading cause of rainforest loss, accounting for nearly half of all destruction. Those fires emitted 4.1 gigatons of planet-warming greenhouse gasses, which is more than four times the emissions from air travel in 2023, the researchers said.
Still, land clearing for agriculture, cattle farming and other causes rose by 14 per cent, the sharpest increase in almost a decade.
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“If this trend continues, it could permanently transform critical natural areas and unleash large amounts of carbon, intensifying climate change and fuelling even more extreme fires,” Peter Potapov, the codirector of the Global Land Analysis and Discovery Lab at the University of Maryland, said in a statement.
Forests do a lot of work to store carbon dioxide, the leading greenhouse gas that is driving climate change. Globally, forests are thought to absorb from the atmosphere more than a quarter of the carbon emissions from human activities every year. Intact tropical forests are especially effective at storing carbon.
Brazil, which has the largest area of tropical forest, accounted for 42 per cent of all tropical primary forest loss in 2024, the data showed. Fires fuelled by the worst drought on record caused 66% of that loss, a more than sixfold increase from 2023. In neighbouring Bolivia, forest loss nearly tripled, as fires initially set to clear land for agriculture turned into huge wildfires because of the severe drought.
Congo and the Republic of Congo also saw their highest levels of forest loss on record, driven by unusually hot and dry conditions. Like the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin plays a crucial role in trapping the world’s carbon.
Land clearing in Congo has been driven by poverty and a deep reliance on forests for food and energy, as well as ongoing conflict and instability, said Teodyl Nkuintchua of the World Resources Institute Africa.
Researchers at the University of Maryland’s lab use satellite imagery to track changes in forest cover. The data is publicly available on the World Resources Institute’s Global Forest Watch platform.
In 2021, more than 140 countries agreed to halt and reverse global forest loss by 2030. But of the 20 countries with the largest area of primary forests, 17 have higher losses today than when the agreement was signed, researchers said.
Some forests showed improvements over prior years. Primary forest loss in Indonesia fell by 11 per cent, reversing a steady increase between 2021 and 2023. Forest loss also declined 13 per cent in Malaysia. Researchers said efforts to restore the land, like thinning trees or prescribed burning, helped to curb wildfires, even amid widespread droughts.
Dominick Spracklen, a professor at the School of Earth and Environment at Leeds University who did not work on the report, said the data showed “an incredibly worrying situation.”
Tropical forests used to be too wet to burn, he said. But as the climate warmed, and as forests degraded from human activity, they were becoming increasingly at risk of fire, he said.
“Last year showed how dangerous the situation has become,” Spracklen said. It also showed how, despite pockets of progress, governments have made little progress toward their pledges to fight deforestation.
The rich nations of the world, in particular, had not yet made good on promises to provide financial support for measures to support tropical forests, he said. “The survival of everyone in the world depends on it.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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