2021 Saw Record Numbers of Trees Destroyed

Widespread destruc­tion of rain­forests con­tin­ued unabated in 2021 despite the agree­ment at COP26 to end defor­esta­tion by 2030 and world lead­ers pledg­ing more than €16.4 bil­lion to those efforts.

Continued defor­esta­tion, pri­mar­ily con­cen­trated in Africa, South America and Southeast Asia, resulted in the loss of bio­di­ver­sity and the emis­sion of 2.5 bil­lion tons of car­bon diox­ide, which is equal to India’s annual CO2 emis­sions. India is cur­rently the third-largest pro­ducer of CO2 emis­sions glob­ally after China and the United States.

According to the new report by the Global Forest Watch and the University of Maryland, the destruc­tion is most acute in the Congo Basin and the Brazilian Amazon. In total, the trop­ics lost 11.1 mil­lion hectares of tree cover in 2021.

Of sig­nif­i­cant con­cern was the loss of 3.75 mil­lion hectares of pri­mary trop­i­cal rain­forests, which are highly val­ued for car­bon seques­tra­tion and pre­vent­ing loss of bio­di­ver­sity.

While most of the report focused on trop­i­cal rain­forests in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Brazil, where an esti­mated 96 per­cent of defor­esta­tion occurs, 2021 also brought increased con­cern over defor­esta­tion in the Arctic. Boreal forests in north­ern regions of Alaska, Russia and Canada expe­ri­enced unprece­dented loss mainly due to wild­fires.

Though cut­ting or burn­ing down trees rarely results in long-term defor­esta­tion, 2021 held the record for the high­est num­ber of trees destroyed in recorded his­tory.

Rod Taylor, the global direc­tor of the forests pro­gram at World Resources Institute, which was part of the team involved in the report, said the trend is alarm­ing.

“Global warm­ing is gen­er­ally hap­pen­ing faster as you get closer to the poles,” he said. ​“It’s like hav­ing a chang­ing cli­mate and an ecosys­tem that’s not cop­ing, so we’re see­ing fires that burn more fre­quently, more inten­sively and more broadly than they ever would under nor­mal con­di­tions.”

Environmental experts are also wor­ried that the Amazon rain­for­est is quickly approach­ing a point of no return when the region emits more CO2 than it can absorb.

This would reverse the progress in reduc­ing car­bon emis­sions and keep­ing global tem­per­a­tures from exceed­ing pre-Industrial aver­ages by more than 1.5 ºC.

Experts said the 143 gov­ern­ments that com­mit­ted to stop­ping and reduc­ing defor­esta­tion by 2030 at COP26 should keep their word by tak­ing dras­tic steps.

According to Taylor, while the global rate of defor­esta­tion seems to be slow­ing, there is an urgent need for defor­esta­tion rates to decrease even more dra­mat­i­cally if the world is to meet the cli­mate goals laid out in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement.

“When you look at unchang­ing year-on-year sta­tis­tics, you could con­clude that they don’t really offer a news­wor­thy head­line,” he said.

“But when it comes to the loss of pri­mary trop­i­cal forests, stub­bornly per­sis­tent rates related to the cli­mate, the extinc­tion cri­sis and the fate of many first peo­ples,” he con­cluded, ​“high rates of loss con­tinue despite pledges from coun­tries and com­pa­nies.”

• Global Forest Watch
• Axios
• The Guardian