Over the past year, tropical forest was destroyed at alarming rates. The data coming from Brazil is of particular concern.
In 2020, tropical areas lost an area of tree cover totalling 12.2 million hectares, slightly more than the size of Bulgaria. The figures, processed by the University of Maryland for the latest update of the Global Forest Watch compiled by the World Resources Institute, make for alarming reading. The state of primary tropical forest is of particular concern.
The picture is particularly dire in tropical humid primary forests, characterised by intense rainfall (more than 200 centimetres per year) and temperatures that remain warm to very warm throughout the year. These delicate ecosystems are crucial for safeguarding biodiversity and absorbing CO2, all the more so because they have never previously been touched by industrial or agricultural activity (hence the term "primary"). In the space of just one year, 4.2 million hectares of them were destroyed — an area the size of the Netherlands — representing a 12 per cent increase on 2019. This means 2.64 gigatonnes of CO2 have been added to the atmosphere, equivalent to the emissions of 570 million cars; more than double the number in circulation in the United States.
The figures from Brazil amount to a total failure. The country tops the unenviable deforestation rankings with 1.7 million hectares destroyed in 2020 — roughly the area of Lazio — a 25 per cent increase on the previous year. The gap between Brazil and the other monitored countries is vast: in second place comes the Democratic Republic of the Congo with "only" 490,000 hectares destroyed.
In 2019, images of the devastating fires in the Amazon had horrified the world, yet in 2020 even more broke out. Differences can also be seen in how they unfolded. Whereas in 2019 fires had been set mainly in areas already deforested for conversion into farmland and pasture, in 2020 far more blazed in the heart of the tropical forest itself.
Far more encouraging news, by contrast, comes from South-East Asia, where forests are typically burned to make way for oil palm cultivation.
It has now been several years since the environmental catastrophe of 2015, when more than 120,000 fires made the air in Indonesia unbreathable for days, killing at least 19 people and poisoning half a million others. Between September and October of that year, the daily greenhouse gas emissions caused by the fires exceeded those of the entire United States economy. Such a glaring environmental disaster prompted the government to introduce a temporary moratorium on new oil palm plantations and a permanent one on the conversion of forests and peatlands into farmland. Similarly, Malaysia lost around one fifth of its primary forests from 2011 onwards, but in 2019 it set a cap on plantations and tightened penalties for illegal logging.
These initiatives, combined with international campaigns, appear to have worked. In both Indonesia and Malaysia the rate of deforestation is falling, with 270,000 and just under 73,000 hectares of tropical forest destroyed respectively in 2020.
