Tropical forests suffered near-record tree loss in 2017

In Brazil, forest fires set by farmers and ranchers to clear land for agriculture raged out of control last year, wiping out more than 3 million acres of trees as a severe drought gripped the region. Those losses undermined Brazil’s recent efforts to protect its rainforests.

In Colombia, a landmark peace deal between the government and the country’s largest rebel group paved the way for a rush of mining, logging and farming that caused deforestation in the nation’s Amazon region to spike last year.

And in the Caribbean, hurricanes Irma and Maria flattened nearly one-third of the forests in Dominica and a wide swath of trees in Puerto Rico last summer.

In all, the world’s tropical forests lost roughly 39 million acres of trees last year, an area roughly the size of Bangladesh, according to a report Wednesday by Global Forest Watch that used new satellite data from the University of Maryland. Global Forest Watch is part of the World Resources Institute, an environmental group.

That made 2017 the second-worst year for tropical tree cover loss in the satellite record, just below the losses in 2016.

The data provides only a partial picture of forest health around the world, since it does not capture trees that are growing back after storms, fires or logging. But separate studies have confirmed that tropical forests are shrinking overall, with losses outweighing the gains.

The new report comes as ministers from forest nations around the world meet in Oslo, Norway, this week to discuss how to step up efforts to protect the world’s tropical forests, which host roughly half of all species worldwide and play a key role in regulating Earth’s climate.

“These new numbers show an alarming situation for the world’s rainforests,” said Andreas Dahl-Jorgensen, deputy director of the Norwegian government’s International Climate and Forest Initiative. “We simply won’t meet the climate targets that we agreed to in Paris without a drastic reduction in tropical deforestation and restoration of forests around the world.”