Don’t be too proud if your country is busy replanting its lost forests. While it’s true that many rich countries are restoring their own forests, they are also indirectly responsible for deforestation elsewhere.
A new study finds that richer nations grow their forests, while poorer nations lose them. Since ever more nations are becoming wealthy, in theory this could drive global reforestation.
The authors say that more developed countries intensify agriculture on the best farmland, and give the rest back to nature. This trend is helped by farmers abandoning their plots to work in cities, and by a reduced need for firewood.
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That suggests that poor rural folks are – inadvertently – the bad guys. But it is not that simple.
When nations get rich, their well-off inhabitants have enough money to buy food and other commodities grown by deforesting other countries. Rich countries don’t stop deforesting; they export it. And Europeans, who turned from net forest destroyers to forest nurturers as long ago as the mid-19th century, may be the prime example.
Trees everywhere
at the University of Helsinki, Finland and his colleagues studied trends in economic development and forest cover around the world.
From 1990 to 2015, forests grew by 1.3 per cent in high-income countries and by 0.5 per cent in higher-middle-income countries. But forests shrank by 0.3 per cent in lower-middle-income countries, and by 0.7 per cent in those at the bottom of the pile.
The team found that nations followed a predictable path from forest loss to forest gain as they developed their economies. China transitioned soon after 1970. Between 1990 and 2015, 13 tropical countries began forest expansion. The small oil-rich state of Brunei, on the tropical island of Borneo, is the only wealthy country still losing forests.
Forests can even expand in countries with fast-growing populations. Since 1970, India has more than doubled its population while going from net forest loss to net gain.
According to UN forest data used in the study, global net deforestation declined from 7.3 million hectares a year in the 1990s to 3.3 million hectares a year in the early 2010s.
Get rich, save trees
However, the suggestion that getting rich is the key to saving forests may be misplaced. While the study paints an environmental halo around rich countries, there is evidence that they are simply exporting the problem.
The European Union is expanding its own forests, but it is “the world’s second-largest driver of deforestation, after China,” says of FERN, a European campaign group focused on forests.
In 2013, a study for the European Commission found that EU consumption of everything from beef and palm oil to rubber and sugar was responsible for , and 36 per cent of the destruction from internationally traded commodities. Over 18 years from 1990, that equated to an area of forests the size of Portugal.
Kauppi says more research is needed about this. “We don’t know the net impact of international trade on forest carbon trends,” he says.
His team also argues that the reforestation of rich countries could be good news in the fight to stop climate change, because forests are “carbon sinks” that absorb carbon dioxide. “The large sink of carbon… will persist, if the well-being continues to improve,” they write.
However, this may also not be true. The area of a forest doesn’t correlate well with the amount of CO2 it stores. . But a switch from natural broadleaved forests to fast-growing conifer monocultures means , according to a 2016 study by  of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany.
PLoS ONE
