In 2021, more than 140 countries around the world promised to end deforestation by the end of the decade. These countries – including Brazil, Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo, which are all strongly wooded – have recognized in their commitment an undeniable basic fact: forests provide critical services on which we count, from the production of oxygen to the cooling of the landscape.
This commitment, just like similar promises made over the years, has so far failed to do much.
Although there is a variation from one year to another, deforestation increases, not down. And last year, destruction reached new heights. New data from the University of Maryland, a leading authority on the loss of world forest, reveal that the tropics have lost more than 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) in 2024. It is the size of the Panama and the largest loss of loss at least at least the last two decades, the duration of the UMD file.
The analysis focused on the tropics because this is where most deforestations, or a clear forest clearing occur. Tropical forests, which focus on equator, are also global hot spots of animal diversity.
Researchers have linked the recent increase in deforestation to an increase in forest fires, as well as industrial agriculture. Unlike temperate or boreal forests in North America and Europe, fires are not natural of the ecosystem. Most of these fires have probably been ignited by people to clean up the land for cattle and commercial crops such as soy, said Goldman. Once on, these fires burn out of control “because of hot and dry conditions,” she said.
Last year was the warmest ever recorded. The rise in temperatures and forest fires they feed are both clear signals for climate change.
“The 2024 numbers must be alarm clock in each country, each bank, each international company,” Goldman said during a press call last week. “The continuation of this path will devastate the savings, the jobs of people and any chance of stimulating the worst effects of climate change.”
But there are not many reasons to believe that the world will take into account this awakening.
Most of the major forest nations that have promised to end deforestation by 2030 suffer more forest loss than they did when they committed. The United States, on the other hand, evolves in the wrong direction under President Donald Trump: although the country has few tropical forests, it tries to overeat fossil global warming and to upset the science necessary to understand how tropical forests change.
The lack of progress is frustrating, said Elsa Ordway, an environmentalist and tropical forestry at the University of California Los Angeles who was not involved in the analysis. For many people, reports on the loss of forest seems to be a “background noise,” she said. “When we think of a planetary crisis that our species needs to face and it is ignored, it is incredibly discouraging,” said Ordway. “We have to take these trends very seriously.”
And the loss of forest in Amazon or Central Africa is not only a distant problem without any impact on the lives of peoples outside the tropics. Everyone depends on these forests – whether for very real pharmaceutical drugs derived from jungle plants or for the carbon emissions they absorb, which helps to slow down the pace of warming. Our actions also have an impact on these forests: certain foods that we buy in the supermarket fuel this destruction. Driver n ° 1 of deforestation in Brazil, for example, erases forests to raise cattle, some of which are exported in the form of beef. (“Maybe don’t consume Brazil beef,” said Ordway.)
The analysis included a few pieces of good news: the rhythm of deforestation in Indonesia, a strongly wooded country remains weak, after years of devastating loss. While forest fires caused a record loss of Record forest in Bolivia last year, an indigenous territory newly established in the country was able to keep fires remotely, according to WRI. “Support for community management can have a real impact,” said Ordway.
But the title to remember is, as it has been doing for years now, dark: the tropical forests of the world continue to fall. Will history ever change?
