Deforestation continued last year at a rate far beyond pledges to end the practice by 2030, according to a major study published yesterday.
Forests nearly the size of Ireland were lost last year, according to two dozen research organizations, non-governmental organizations and advocacy groups, with 6.37 million hectares of trees felled and burned. This “significantly exceeded” levels that would have kept the world on track to eliminate deforestation by the end of the decade, a commitment made in 2021 by more than 140 leaders.
Forests are home to 80 percent of the world’s terrestrial plant and animal species, and crucial for regulating water cycles and sequestering carbon dioxide, the main greenhouse gas responsible for global warming.
Photo: AFP
“Globally, deforestation has gotten worse, not better, since the beginning of the decade,” said Ivan Palmegiani, a biodiversity and land use consultant at Climate Focus and lead author of the “Forest Declaration Assessment” report.
“We’re only six years away from a critical global deadline to end deforestation, and forests continue to be chopped down, degraded, and set ablaze at alarming rates,” he said.
Last year, 3.7 million hectares of tropical primary forest — particularly carbon rich and ecologically biodiverse environments — disappeared, a figure that should have fallen significantly to meet the 2030 objective.
In high-risk regions, researchers pointed to backsliding in Bolivia and Indonesia. The report said there was an “alarming rise” in deforestation in Bolivia, which jumped 351 percent between 2015 and last year.
The “trend shows no sign of abating,” it added, with forests largely cleared for agriculture, notably for soya, but also beef and sugar.
In Indonesia, deforestation slumped between 2020 and 2022, but started rising sharply last year.
Ironically, that is partly down to demand for materials often seen as eco-friendly, such as viscose for clothing, and a surge in nickel mining for electric vehicle batteries and renewable energy technologies.
There was better news from Brazil.
While it remains the nation with the highest deforestation rates in the world, it has made key progress. The situation has significantly improved in the Amazon, which has benefited from protective measures put in place by Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva.
However, in the Cerrado, a key tropical savannah below the Amazon, deforestation has increased.
Erin Matson, senior consultant at Climate Focus and coauthor of the report, said “strong policies and strong enforcement” are needed.
“To meet global forest protection targets, we must make forest protection immune to political and economic whims,” she said.
The report comes in the wake of the European Commission’s proposal last week to postpone by a year (to the end of next year) its anti-deforestation law, despite protests from non-governmental organizations.
“We have to fundamentally rethink our relationship with consumption and our models of production to shift away from a reliance on overexploiting natural resources,” Matson said.
AFGHAN CHILD: A court battle is ongoing over if the toddler can stay with Joshua Mast and his wife, who wanted ‘life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness’ for her Major Joshua Mast, a US Marine whose adoption of an Afghan war orphan has spurred a years-long legal battle, is to remain on active duty after a three-member panel of Marines on Tuesday found that while he acted in a way unbecoming of an officer to bring home the baby girl, it did not warrant his separation from the military. Lawyers for the Marine Corps argued that Mast abused his position, disregarded orders of his superiors, mishandled classified information and improperly used a government computer in his fight over the child who was found orphaned on the battlefield in rural Afghanistan
STICKING TO DEFENSE: Despite the screening of videos in which they appeared, one of the defendants said they had no memory of the event A court trying a Frenchman charged with drugging his wife and enlisting dozens of strangers to rape her screened videos of the abuse to the public on Friday, to challenge several codefendants who denied knowing she was unconscious during their actions. The judge in the southern city of Avignon had nine videos and several photographs of the abuse of Gisele Pelicot shown in the courtroom and an adjoining public chamber, involving seven of the 50 men accused alongside her husband. Present in the courtroom herself, Gisele Pelicot looked at her telephone during the hour and a half of screenings, while her ex-husband
NEW STORM: investigators dubbed the attacks on US telecoms ‘Salt Typhoon,’ after authorities earlier this year disrupted China’s ‘Flax Typhoon’ hacking group Chinese hackers accessed the networks of US broadband providers and obtained information from systems that the federal government uses for court-authorized wiretapping, the Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Saturday. The networks of Verizon Communications, AT&T and Lumen Technologies, along with other telecoms, were breached by the recently discovered intrusion, the newspaper said, citing people familiar with the matter. The hackers might have held access for months to network infrastructure used by the companies to cooperate with court-authorized US requests for communications data, the report said. The hackers had also accessed other tranches of Internet traffic, it said. The Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs
EYEING THE US ELECTION: Analysts say that Pyongyang would likely leverage its enlarged nuclear arsenal for concessions after a new US administration is inaugurated North Korean leader Kim Jong-un warned again that he could use nuclear weapons in potential conflicts with South Korea and the US, as he accused them of provoking North Korea and raising animosities on the Korean Peninsula, state media reported yesterday. Kim has issued threats to use nuclear weapons pre-emptively numerous times, but his latest warning came as experts said that North Korea could ramp up hostilities ahead of next month’s US presidential election. In a Monday speech at a university named after him, the Kim Jong-un National Defense University, he said that North Korea “will without hesitation use all its attack