Global Forest Loss Remains 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 report issued on Thursday. Record wildfires in Canada and expanding agriculture elsewhere offset big gains in forest protection in Brazil and Colombia, the report 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 percent 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 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 percent decrease in global forest loss into a 24 percent 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.