Destruction of rainforest accelerates
An area of rainforest almost twice the size of Wales was destroyed last year, with illegal land-grabbing in the Brazilian Amazon one of the causes, a study has found.
A total of 3.8 million hectares of old growth rainforest, which is the most diverse wildlife habitat on the planet, was burnt or cut down. The amount lost was 2.8 per cent up on 2018 and the third highest level this century, according to data compiled by the University of Maryland.
Fires and land clearances for agriculture, logging and mining were the main causes. Brazil accounted for more than a third of all mature rainforest lost, or 1.4 million hectares. Deforestation of the Amazon has continued at an even higher rate this year, with other research showing that it was up 64 per cent in April compared with the same month last year.
All the biggest British supermarkets threatened last month to boycott produce from Brazil if President Bolsonaro succeeded in passing a new law legitimising land converted to agriculture without authorisation up to 2018.
Conservation groups say that this would reward and encourage landgrabbers.
The Democratic Republic of Congo lost the second highest amount of rainforest last year – 475,000 hectares.
Indonesia was next, losing 324,000, though this was 5 per cent down on the amount the previous year and the third year in a row in which the country recorded a decline in deforestation. The World Resources Institute, a US-based not-for-profit group that analysed the data, attributed the decline in Indonesia to greater law enforcement aimed at preventing forest fires and land clearing as well as the government’s moratorium on converting primary forest into palm oil plantations.
Devastating fires meant that Bolivia experienced its worst year on record for deforestation, losing 290,000 hectares. The institute said that much of the loss in Bolivia was probably driven by fires started to clear land for agriculture but which spread out of control.
Some countries reduced deforestation sharply, including Ghana and Ivory Coast, where it more than halved on the previous year.
The institute said this could partly be due to major cocoa companies that source from those countries acting to end deforestation.
The institute said that most countries were likely to fail to meet the commitment, which was made under the 2014 New York Declaration on Forests, to halve the rate of tropical deforestation by this year.