Forest area more than Germany’s size lost in 10 yrs
PARIS: More than 430,000 square kilometres - an area bigger than Germany - of forest cover have been lost in a little over a decade in just a handful of deforestation hot spots, conservation organisation WWF said on Wednesday.
Swathes of forest continue to be flattened each year - mainly due to industrial-scale agriculture - as biodiversity-rich areas are cleared to create space for livestock and crops.
Analysis by the WWF found that just 29 sites across South America, Africa and South East Asia were responsible for more than half of the global forest loss.
The Brazilian Amazon and Cerrado, the Bolivian Amazon, Paraguay, Argentina, Madagascar, along with Sumatra and Borneo in Indonesia and Malaysia were among the worst affected, it said. In Brazil’s Cerrado region, home to 5% of the planet’s animals and plants, land has been cleared rapidly for soy and cattle production, leading to a 32.8% loss of forest area between 2004-2017.
The UN’S Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change issued a groundbreaking report on land use in 2019, in which it outlined a string of looming trade-offs in using land. In that same year, the UN’S biodiversity panel said that 75% of all land on earth had been “severely degraded” by human activity.
Forests are an enormous carbon sink, together with other vegetation and soil sucking up a third of all the carbon pollution humans produce annually. Yet they continue to disappear rapidly, threatening irreparable losses to crucial biodiversity.