Finds in a study published two months ago by University of Maryland researchers has
revealed some disturbing news.
The rate at which tropical forests were cut, burned or otherwise lost from the 1990s through the 2000s accelerated by 62 percent, according to a new study which dramatically reverses a previous estimate of a 25 percent slowdown over the same period. That previous estimate, from the U.N.’s Food and Agriculture Organization’s (FAO) Forest Resource Assessment, was based on a collection of reports from dozens of countries. The new estimate, in contrast, is based on vast amounts of Landsat image data which directly record the changes to forests over 20 years.
“Several satellite-based local and regional studies have been made for changing rates of deforestation [during] the 1990s and 2000s, but our study is the first pan-tropical scale analysis,” explains University of Maryland, College Park, geographer Do-Hyung Kim, lead author of the new study accepted for publication in Geophysical Research Letters, a journal of the American Geophysical Union.
[bold my emphasis]
That is the opposite kind of news you are hoping to hear. The increase is the result of technological advances (once we used axes and now we use tractors); and while it seems as if it is a huge contradiction of the previous FAO findings, they point out that the FAO did not use the satellite images and had been very clear about pointing out that omission. Unfortunately, this doesn't grow forests to the planet.
In terms of where the deforestation was happening, they found that tropical Latin America showed the largest increase of annual net loss of 1.4 million hectares (5,400 square miles) per year from the 1990s to the 2000s, with Brazil topping the list at 0.6 million hectares (2,300 square miles) per year. Tropical Asia showed the second largest increase at 0.8 million hectares (3,100 square miles) per year, with similar trends across the countries of Indonesia, Malaysia, Cambodia, Thailand and the Philippines. Tropical Africa showed the least amount of annual net forest area loss. Still, there was a steady increase of net forest loss in tropical Africa due to cutting primarily in Democratic Republic of Congo and Madagascar. [...]
“Tropical deforestation plays a big role in global climate cycles,” he explained, pointing out that the cutting and burning of forests accounted for 20 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in 1990s.
It's information like this that makes global
climate education and action that much more essential.