The overall rate of primary forest loss across the tropics remained stubbornly high in 2023, putting the world well off track from its net-zero deforestation target by 2030, according to a new report from the World Resources Institute.
The few bright spots were Brazil and Colombia, where changes in political leadership helped drive down deforestation rates in the Amazon.
Elsewhere, however, several countries hit record-high rates of forest loss, including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Bolivia and Laos, driven largely by agriculture, mining and fires.
The report authors call for “bold global mechanisms and unique local initiatives to achieve enduring reductions in deforestation across all tropical front countries.”
JAKARTA — The tropics continue to lose primary forest at an alarming rate, with an area of tree cover half the size of Panama disappearing in 2023, new data from the University of Maryland’s GLAD lab show.
Primary forest loss last year amounted to 3.7 million hectares (9.1 million acres), according to the data, available on the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform managed by the World Resources Institute (WRI). And while this marks or 9% decrease from 2022, it’s virtually unchanged from the 2019 and 2021 deforestation rates. On average, over the past two decades, the world has consistently lost 3 million to 4 million hectares (7.4 million to 9.9 million acres) of tropical forest every year.
This leaves the planet well off track from achieving zero deforestation by 2030, a global target agreed to by 145 countries at the COP26 climate summit in Glasgow in 2021.
Forest loss, particularly in the tropics, releases huge volumes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. Halting and reversing forest loss by the end of the decade is considered essential to meeting the Paris Agreement goal of capping the global average temperature rise at 1.5° Celsius (2.7° Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels.
“Forests are critical ecosystems for fighting climate change, supporting livelihoods, and protecting biodiversity,” said WRI president and CEO Ani Dasgupta. “The world has just six years left to keep its promise to halt deforestation. This year’s forest loss numbers tell an inspiring story of what we can achieve when leaders prioritize action, but the data also highlights many urgent areas of missed opportunity to protect our forests and our future.”
Dasgupta was referring to the significant decline of forest loss in Brazil and Colombia as one of the few bright spots coming out of the 2023 data. The WRI attributes the decline there to changes in leadership and policy shifts on forest protection in the two Amazonian countries.
But progress there has been offset by sharp increases in deforestation in tropical countries like Bolivia, Laos and Nicaragua. Other countries also experienced modest increases in forest loss. Outside the tropics, there were also massive increases in forest loss recorded, with Canada experiencing record-breaking fire-related loss.
As a result, the world took “two steps forward, two steps back” in halting forest loss, said GFW director Mikaela Weisse.
“Steep declines in the Brazilian Amazon and Colombia show that progress is possible, but increasing forest loss in other areas has largely counteracted that progress,” she said. “We must learn from the countries that are successfully slowing deforestation or else we will continue to rapidly lose one of our most effective tools for fighting climate change, protecting biodiversity and supporting the health and livelihoods of millions of people.”
Brazil
Due to its immense forest area, Brazil continues to have the largest share of tropical primary forest loss, at 1.1 million hectares (2.7 million acres) of loss in 2023.
But that figure represents a 36% reduction in primary forest loss from the previous year, and the lowest level since 2016. This has resulted in a considerable decrease in Brazil’s overall share of total global primary forest loss — down from 43% in 2022 to 30% in 2023.
The reduction in forest loss coincides with President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s first year back in office. Lula already had a track record of dramatically reducing deforestation in the Amazon during his previous terms as a president from 2003-2010, which saw a decrease of 84% between 2004 and 2012.
Since taking office at the start of 2023, Lula has rolled out a number of forest protection policies, such as revoking anti-environmental measures, recognizing new Indigenous territories, and bolstering law enforcement efforts. These actions are aimed at undoing the damage done by his predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, whose administration weakened environmental protections and gutted enforcement agencies. Under Bolsonaro, no new Indigenous lands were recognized, and deforestation soared to a 15-year high.
Through his policies, Lula has targeted to end deforestation in the Amazon and Brazil’s other biomes by 2030. The decline in forest loss was strongest in the Amazon, with 39% less primary forest loss in 2023 than in 2022.
“We’re incredibly proud to see such stark progress being made across the country, especially in the Brazilian Amazon,” said Mariana Oliveira, manager of the forests, land use and agriculture program at WRI Brasil.
Yet forest loss in Brazil last year was still nearly double the historical lows of the early 2010s.
“There’s progress in a single year, but a lot more to go to replicate what it’s able to achieve before,” said Matt Hansen, a remote-sensing scientist at the University of Maryland and co-director of the GLAD lab.
And not all Brazilian biomes have seen the same trend as the Amazon, as both the Cerrado grasslands and Pantanal wetlands saw increased forest loss in 2023. The Cerrado, home to the richest biodiversity of any savanna ecosystem in the world, experienced a 6% increase in tree cover loss from 2022 to 2023, continuing a five-year rising trend. The WRI attributed this to agricultural expansion, with the area of Cerrado converted to soy production more than doubling over the past 20 years.
The Pantanal biome, the world’s largest tropical wetland, also saw a spike in forest loss in 2023 due to fires, which have been exacerbated by a multiyear megadrought caused in part by climate change.
While primary forest loss in the Brazilian Amazon has declined, there’s still growing concern that the world’s greatest rainforest is inching closer toward a tipping point — beyond which it will unravel irrevocably into a dry savanna — due to the feedback loops between deforestation, warming temperatures and drought.
Weisse said it’s hard to tell if the Amazon has reached its tipping point just based on the tree cover loss data.
“But we’ve seen this increasingly fire dynamic in Bolivia and the Pantanal biome in Brazil, a shift in fire regime where we see more and more of these fires coming in and repeat burning in some of these areas,” she said. “It’s too early to say if that’s because we’ve reached a tipping point or is there other climate factors involved in that, but it’s an area we’re keeping an eye on.”
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