The direct causes of tropical forests being lost are the expansions of commercial agriculture, augmented in different regions to different degrees by clearing for small-scale agriculture, extractive activities and roads and other infrastructure, with complex linkages among them.
Over the past decade there have been satellite images and other technologies that have revolutionized our ability to monitor and understand the things that cause forest loss.
The global tree loss coverage trends show that in this center there has been, by far, the most deforestation is occurring in the tropics. Now there has been more than two decades of data on the loss of primary tropical forests, and this paints a sobering picture. This being stubbornly persistent annual losses hovering around three to four million hectares each year, punctuated by spikes associated with major fires.
The lockdowns during the coronavirus pandemic hadn’t appeared to disrupt the patterns in a consistent way; in fact the losses ticked up in 2020 compared to the year prior. Like wise, the effects on forests of the abrupt shifts in global supply chains for energy and food prompted by the war in Ukraine are not immediately discernible in the 2022 data.
More worrisome of a signal in recent data is that forest loss is increasingly driven by climate change through increased exposure to droughts, fires, storms and pest outbreaks globally.
These losses are tragic on many levels. Tropical rainforests are valuable for meeting global objectives: their vegetation and soils sequester vast amounts of carbon, and they harbor a disproportionate share of the world’s plant and animal species.
Forests play many important, if not hidden, roles in stabilizing the climate at global, regional and local scales in ways other than via their role in the global carbon cycle. scientists are increasingly recognizing the special role of tropical forests in regulating the global climate system. There is more to be said for this is a very expansive issue but this brings up most of the heavy issues brought about by deforestation.
Some news is that deforestation data spanning the last couple decades reveals that efforts to slow a persistent hemorrhaging of the world’s most valuable terrestrial ecosystems are not yet sufficient to stop the bleeding.
However, some good news on this is that forests are on the high end of the international agenda. This means that there are many of initiatives going underway to go through on the existing commitments to halt and reverse forest loss in the interest of climate mitigation. these actions are being complemented with reaffirmations of forests’ importance to biodiversity.
Global Environmental Change 