World leaders love to present trees as the answer to our climate change woes. And scientists calculate Earth has room for another 0.9 billion hectares of trees, which could buy us an extra 20 years to decarbonise our societies as they lock up our emitted carbon. But many countries are terrible at even holding on to their existing, carbon-rich trees.
Satellite data shows the world lost 4.2 million hectares of undisturbed rainforest last year, up 12 per cent on 2019, according to the US non-profit World Resources Institute (WRI) and . Losses in the tropics have now increased for two years in a row, driven mostly by forests being cleared for agriculture.
However, this problem isn’t caused solely by lower-income countries, as made clear by linking deforestation to international trade. High-income countries – including the UK, Japan and Germany – are driving deforestation abroad with their demand for beef, soy, palm oil and other goods.
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Last year’s increase in tree cover loss, which includes deforestation as well as natural losses, such as through fire, is especially galling because 2020 was the deadline a host of countries and businesses  from 2014 levels. “It was supposed to be a landmark year. The fact that we are still seeing things tick up rather than down is a really big cause for concern,” says Mikaela Weisse at WRI.
“It’s pretty shocking to be honest,” says Simon Lewis at the University of Leeds, UK, who wasn’t involved in the analysis.
The timing also poses a headache for the United Nations and the countries hoping for a good outcome at this year’s pivotal COP26 climate summit in November. Patricia Espinosa, the executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, says a “really critical” factor in the summit’s success will be high-income countries delivering on of sending $100 billion a year of climate finance to lower-income ones.
But alarming deforestation trends in Brazil under President Jair Bolsonaro saw to Brazil for protecting the Amazon rainforest in 2019. The situation is no better today, with Brazil losing 1.7 million hectares in 2020, three times that of the country with the next biggest losses, the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Moreover, Brazil’s increase in loss was more than twice the global average, at 25 per cent. Boosting climate aid to Brazil in that context poses a tricky conundrum for high-income countries.
These rates of tree cover loss have a huge climate impact. Weisse and her colleagues estimate last year’s loss released about 2.64 billion tonnes of CO2, roughly on a par with India, the world’s fourth biggest emitter. Continuing with such colossal emissions will wipe out the amount of CO2 that tree-planting is expected to absorb.
Lewis says existing government plans for reforestation will sequester about 1.8 billion tonnes of CO2 a year between now and 2050. His message to leaders meeting at COP26 is: “It’s absolutely essential that tackling deforestation goes alongside rapidly reducing emissions from fossil fuel use.”
Worse still, climate change cuts both ways – it can fuel forest loss too. “We are seeing some impacts of climate change in the data,” says Elizabeth Goldman at WRI, citing tree loss in 2020 from fires in Siberia and Australia linked to climate change, and bark beetle infestations in the Czech Republic and other parts of central Europe made possible by higher temperatures.
There are few quick fixes. The European Commission and UK government are considering using trade deals and regulations to apply pressure on countries such as Brazil to curb deforestation. However, such pressure could be negatively framed within Brazil as infringing on its sovereignty, says Weisse. “The concern is there would be a backlash to that,” she says.
A better approach would be sending funds directly to existing organisations fighting deforestation in Brazil, she says.
Globally, the problem isn’t hopeless, says Goldman, who points to the “bright spots” of falling forest loss in Indonesia and Malaysia last year as signs that government policies to curb deforestation can work.
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