More than a year after countries pledged to end deforestation by 2030, the world continues to lose its tropical forests at a rapid pace, according to a report released Tuesday.
The annual survey by the World Resources Institute, a research organization, found that the world lost 10.2 million hectares of primary rainforest in 2022, a 10 percent increase from the previous year. It is the first assessment to cover a full year since November 2021, when 145 countries at a global climate summit in Glasgow pledged to halt forest loss by the end of this decade.
“We were hoping by now to see a signal in the data that we were stopping forest loss,” said Francis Seymour, senior fellow at the institute’s forest program. “We don’t see that signal yet, and in fact we’re on the wrong track.”
The report, produced in collaboration with the University of Maryland, documented tree loss in the tropics from deforestation, fires and other causes. Last year’s destruction resulted in 2.7 gigatonnes of carbon dioxide emissions, a substantial amount roughly equivalent to annual fossil fuel emissions in India, a country of 1.4 billion people.
Deforestation of tropical forests is also affecting some of the planet’s richest ecosystems, habitats for plants and animals, and regulators of rainfall patterns in several countries.
The Amazon rainforest, the world’s largest, has not faced such tremendous destruction in nearly two decades, according to an analysis of World Resources Institute data by research organization Amazon Conservation.
Brazil, the country with the largest proportion of tropical rainforest, had the highest rate of deforestation in the world. They accounted for more than 40 percent of global tree loss, followed by the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia.
Bolivia provided some of the most striking numbers in the report. There, forest loss increased by 32 percent last year, the highest rate ever recorded in this country. It was one of the few tropical forest countries not to sign the Glasgow pledge on deforestation.
Marlene Quintanilla, research director at Fundación Amigos de la Naturaleza, a non-profit group in Bolivia, said a major driver of destruction in that country has been government policies that encourage farmers to clear vast tracts of land to secure land titles.
“No social or economic function is attributed to the forest,” she said.
The expansion of agriculture appeared to be damaging forests in Africa. In Ghana, the country that lost most of its primary forest last year, small-scale clearing for cocoa cultivation has been a major cause of deforestation.
Deforestation is closely linked to a lack of economic opportunity and basic infrastructure in the Congo River Basin region. In the Democratic Republic of the Congo, for example, most people do not have access to electricity, so the forest is an important source of firewood and charcoal for cooking.
Teodyl Nkuinchua, who works on strategy and public relations for the World Resources Institute in the Congo Basin, said measures to limit environmental damage alone would not work.
“If we don’t integrate development priorities into these policies in these countries, we will not be able to fight deforestation,” he said.
One of the few bright spots in the report came from Southeast Asia, where efforts to curb deforestation in Malaysia and Indonesia continued to show results. A moratorium on deforestation, efforts to restore peatlands, and corporate commitments to exclude palm oil suppliers linked to deforestation appear to be effective.
And there are signs that the trajectory of global deforestation may change for the better in the near future.
The European Union made a push in this direction this year, passing legislation banning the import of a range of products that contribute to deforestation in tropical countries. China, the world’s largest importer of many agricultural commodities, recently pledged to crack down on illegal logging linked to its trade with Brazil.
Brazil also appears to be changing course. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office in January and pledged to protect the Amazon rainforest. Preliminary figures for the first five months of the year suggest that the rate of deforestation there has fallen by 31 percent since January. Deforestation and environmental crime had increased sharply under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro.
The report’s analysis focuses on the tropics, where forest loss is typically more permanent and tends to be caused by human activities. Tropical forests also play a greater role in storing carbon and supporting biodiversity. But global tree cover loss outside the tropics fell 10 percent last year.
According to the report, the decline was a direct result of reduced wildfires in Russia’s boreal forests. But that could change. Canada is on track to experience its worst wildfire season on record.
El Niño, a climate pattern typically associated with more wildfires in the tropics, has also just arrived. There is concern that even if countries manage to curb deforestation over this period, wildfires could scupper some of their efforts.
“An El Niño year will be a test,” said Rod Taylor, global director for forests at the World Resources Institute, adding he hopes the fires are not devastating. “But we will see.”