Global forest loss still high, despite recent progress

Despite major progress in protecting vast tracts of rainforest, the world failed again last year to significantly slow the pace of global forest destruction, according to a recent report.

Record wildfires in Canada and expanding agriculture elsewhere offset big gains in forest protection in Brazil and Colombia, the report, issued April 4, found.

The annual survey by the World Resources Institute, a research organization, found that the world lost 9.1 million acres of primary tropical forest in 2023, equivalent to an area almost the size of Switzerland, about 9% less than the year before. But the improvement failed to put the world on course to halt all forest loss by 2030 — a commitment made by 145 nations at a global climate talks in Glasgow, Scotland, in 2021 and reaffirmed by all countries last year.

“Global leaders sent an undeniable message that forests are critical to meeting global climate goals,” said Rod Taylor, the global director for forests at the World Resources Institute. But, he added, “we are far off track and trending in the wrong direction.”

The immense wildfires in Canada last year destroyed such a huge tract of boreal forests, almost three times as much as in any other year, that they turned what would have been a 4% decrease in global forest loss into a 24% increase over last year.

The report focuses on the tropics because deforestation and fires there are mostly caused by human activity and can create longer-lasting consequences. The humid forests of tropical countries hold a quarter of all carbon stored on land and are home to a large share of animal and plant species, making their protection essential both to curb climate change and to avert biodiversity loss.

Researchers at the World Resources Institute, working in collaboration with the University of Maryland, documented tree loss across the world from deforestation, fires and other causes. Last year’s destruction resulted in 2.4 gigatons of carbon dioxide emissions, which is roughly equivalent to half of what the burning of fossil fuels in the United States produces each year.

Still, last year’s results showed that progress is possible when forest protection is a priority for world leaders. A recent change in leadership in Brazil and Colombia, which together hold almost a third of the world’s tropical forests, produced a steep decrease in deforestation rates in the two countries.

Brazil lost 2.8 million acres of forest last year, 36% less than in 2022. Before taking office in 2023, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva took office said the country was “ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis.” Brazil, which is home to more than half of the Amazon rainforest, accounted for 30% of the tropical forest loss globally last year.

Colombia, where President Gustavo Petro took office in 2022 vowing to protect the rainforest, recorded an even steeper improvement, slashing deforestation rates by 49%. Both Brazil and Colombia increased funding for environmental protection, created new programs to develop sustainable economic alternatives for rainforest regions and made efforts to protect local communities who defend forests.

But there are concerns about how permanent those gains will be. In Indonesia, one of the countries that has made the most progress in fighting deforestation over the past decade, tree loss has started ticking up again in the last two years.

“Ephemeral victories or ephemeral progress in slowing deforestation may not be progress at all,” said Matthew Hansen, the co-director of a laboratory at the University of Maryland that investigates changes in land use around the world.