Brazil accounts for a third of tropical forest loss in 2019

Destruction of tropical forests worldwide increased last year, led again by Brazil, which was responsible for more than a third of the total, and where deforestation of the Amazon through clear-cutting appears to be on the rise under the pro-development policies of the country’s president.

Jair Bolsonaro, who took office at the beginning of 2019, has aggressively pursued development in the Amazon, including mining and large-scale agriculture, and has begun dismantling programs that protect Indigenous lands.

The worldwide total loss of oldgrowth, or primary, tropical forest — 9.3 million acres, an area nearly the size of Switzerland — was about 3% higher than 2018 and the third largest since 2002. Only 2016 and 2017 were worse, when heat and drought led to record fires and deforestation, especially in Brazil.

“The level of forest loss we saw in 2019 is unacceptable,” said Frances Seymour, a fellow with the environmental research group World Resources Institute, which released the deforestation data through its Global Forest Watch program. “We seem to be going in the wrong direction.”

Global Forest Watch researchers estimated that the loss of primary tropical forest in 2019 resulted in the release of more than 2 billion tons of carbon dioxide, or more than the emissions from all on-road vehicles in the United States in a typical year.

Seymour said the outlook for 2020 is not good as the coronavirus pandemic continues.

Restrictions on mobility and looming budget cuts as a result of the economic fallout from the global crisis may hamper efforts to enforce antideforestation laws, she said. “Bad actors will try to take advantage with more illegal logging, mining, clearing and poaching.”