A sweeping global report published by the Global Forest Watch project has shown that the world lost tropical forests at a rate of 40 square miles a day in 2021.
The report showed that some 3.75 million hectares of largely untouched, or primary, tropical forest were chopped down or burned last year and that is roughly equivalent to deforesting 30 of New York’s Central Park every day.
According to the report, the continuing rapid rates of deforestation, or forest loss, are both decimating biodiversity in fragile ecosystems, like the Congo and Amazon rainforests and negatively impacting attempts to reduce the planet-heating emissions driving the climate crisis.
“Many forests act as carbon storage areas, known as “carbon sinks”, by absorbing carbon from the atmosphere through the process of photosynthesis,” the report which was published on Thursday showed.
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It further showed that deforestation not only damages this valuable natural ally in fighting climate change but also emits additional massive amounts of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere when forests burn.
The research which was led by the non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI), using data from the University of Maryland, also found that the global stocktake on forests comes after 141 global leaders signed a Declaration on Forests and Land Use at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow this past November.
The pledge aims to stop, and reverse, forest loss around the world by 2030, to meet the 2015 Paris Agreement goal of keeping the planet “well below” two degrees of warming.
Speaking during a briefing on the report on Thursday, Frances Seymour, a distinguished senior fellow at WRI said that climate change itself was making it harder and harder to even maintain the forest that we still have.
“No one should even think about planting trees over here instead of reducing fossil fuel emissions over there. It’s got to be both and, it’s got to be now before it’s too late,” she said.
Story was adapted from Independent.
