The world lost an area of old-growth tropical rainforest the size of Switzerland last year, as deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon continued unabated, a forest monitoring project report said yesterday.
Global Forest Watch, which is backed by the nonprofit World Resources Institute (WRI) and draws on forest data collected by the University of Maryland, said that about 41,000km2 of tropical rainforest was lost last year. That was the final year of Jair Bolsonaro’s government in Brazil, which accounted for more than 40 percent of all losses.
Despite a recent global pledge to reach zero deforestation by 2030, tropical forest loss last year exceeded 2021 levels.
Photo: AFP
“2022 numbers are particularly disheartening,” WRI distinguished senior fellow Francis Seymour said. “We had hoped by now to see a signal in the data that we were turning the corner on forest loss.”
Global Forest Watch assessed “primary forests,” which includes mature forests that have not been cleared or regrown in recent history.
Such forests protect against climate change because they absorb vast amounts of carbon dioxide. Last year’s losses in the tropics released about 2.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide, equivalent to India’s annual fossil fuel emissions, the report said.
Indonesia and Malaysia managed to keep forest loss near a record low, continuing a multiyear streak of stamping down deforestation driven by oil palm plantations.
Strict Indonesian policies, such as a moratorium on new licences in primary forest and peatland, helped the turnabout.
Other forest-rich nations have struggled to keep up with Asia’s progress. The Democratic Republic of the Congo and Bolivia suffered the greatest losses of tropical forest after Brazil.
Commodity agriculture was largely responsible for deforestation in Bolivia, as the government supports agribusiness expansion, experts said.
Bolivia is one of few nations not to join the zero-deforestation pledge.
However, that pledge has not yet made a difference. The Global Forest Watch analysis found deforestation last year was more than 10,000km2 in excess of what would be needed to halt it by 2030.
“We are far off track and trending in the wrong direction,” said Rod Taylor, WRI’s global forests program director.
The world lost 10 percent less forest last year than 2021, as fewer big fires burned in the Russian boreal forest, though the country still lost 43,000km2 of tree cover last year.
A tropical depression east of the Philippines became a tropical storm named Trami at 2am yesterday, and is projected to move west-northwest toward waters east of Luzon Island, the Central Weather Administration (CWA) said. As of 8am, Trami’s center was 700km east of Manila, or 1,180km southeast of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost tip, moving in a northwesterly direction. It was carrying maximum sustained winds of 65kph, with gusts of up to 90kph, CWA data showed. The weather agency forecast the center of the storm would be over waters 470km east-northeast of Manila or 820km southeast of Oluanpi at 8am today, and urged ships
Taiwan Power Co (Taipower, 台電) yesterday temporarily shut down the nation’s nuclear energy generation as the state-run utility started regular maintenance on the remaining reactor at the Ma-anshan Nuclear Power Plant for 41 days. The No. 2 reactor of the nation’s only active nuclear plant in Pingtung County’s Hengchun Township (恆春) is set to be decommissioned next year. The No. 1 reactor has been offline since July. The shutdown is to perform equipment maintenance and fuel replacement in preparation for the power plant’s next operating cycle, Taipower said in a statement. With support from other energy sources, Taipower would ensure sufficient power supply
TROUBLED WATERS: The ministers also said they opposed China’s obstruction of freedom of navigation in the South China Sea and the militarization of disputed features G7 defense ministers in a joint statement on Saturday singled out China over a number of concerns, including its “provocative actions” near Taiwan. The defense ministers of Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, the UK and the US gathered in Naples, Italy, from Friday to yesterday for the group’s first ministerial meeting dedicated to defense. In the joint declaration, they stressed “enduring unity and common determination to address, in a cohesive and concrete manner, security challenges, at a time in history marked by great instability.” In addition to voicing support for Ukraine, expressing concern about the escalating conflict in the Middle East and condemning
BIGGEST TROUBLEMAKER: China should not be carrying out any such exercises given the threat to regional peace and stability, Premier Cho Jung-tai said yesterday The Ministry of National Defense yesterday said that live-fire Chinese drills in a province facing Taiwan are part of routine annual drills, but also possibly part of China’s “deterrence effect” in the waters of the Taiwan Strait. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration, in a notice late on Monday, said an area around Niushan Island in China’s Fujian Province would be closed off for four hours from 9am yesterday for live-fire drills. Niushan sits just south of the Taiwan-controlled Matsu islands. The ministry in a statement said that the exercises are part of routine Chinese training and it was keeping a close watch, but