Global forest loss kept rising in 2021

Wildfires and global commodities industries wiped out 11 million hectares of forest cover in 2021 — approximately the area of the state of Tennessee or the nation of Denmark, according to a study published on Thursday by Global Forest Watch.

This represented a “stubbornly consistent” pattern of global forest loss, with tropical forests at particular risk, according to the study.

But corrective action by both national governments and global companies also demonstrated how that decline can be successfully halted, the study found.

One particular success story has been Indonesia, once notorious for the massive deforestation caused by the palm oil industry — which joins soy and cattle as a key historical driver of global forest loss.

Palm oil is a key component in E.U.-imported biofuels and a staggering range of consumer goods, from L’Oreal shampoos to Nestle chocolates.

But deforestation for palm oil is now at a 20-year low, according to a study published last month in PLOS One.

That comes following five straight years of reduction driven by a combination of corporate commitments and government action by both Western importers and the Indonesian and Malaysian governments, the study found.

That decline coincides with the implementation of “No Deforestation” commitments by many principal global palm oil importers, Global Forest Watch noted.

But those gains are endangered by the rise in oil palm prices, Forest Watch noted, which now stand at a 40-year high, thanks in large measure to surging edible oil prices following the interruption of sunflower oil supplies amid the Ukraine war, as The Hill reported.

Similar price factors risk driving growth of the soy industry, another key crop for cooking oil, whose expansion in tropical nations like Bolivia has mostly “come at the expense of forests,” Forest Watch found.

And in neighboring Brazil, continuing high rates of deforestation have largely been driven by the cattle industry, the study found, as the source of beef and leather that often finds its way into the United States.

Brazil saw its highest rates of deforestation in nearly two decades in 2021, raising concerns that the Amazon rainforest is headed towards a “tipping point” of runaway landscape change that would permanently change “massive areas of the Amazon to a savannah,” the study found. 

Water vapor released by Amazon forests is a key source of precipitation for key U.S. agricultural areas in the Midwest, according to a 2014 study in Nature.

But one of the greatest sources of losses across all forest landscapes — from the Russian taiga to the U.S. Western alpine to Brazilian tropics — was extensive and aggressive wildfires.

In 2021, Russia alone lost 6.5 million hectares in its worst fire year since it began keeping records, a whopping 60 percent of the total global forest loss found by the study. 

The vast evergreen expanses of the Siberian taiga sit atop carbon-rich peatland and methane-rich permafrost, both of which release huge amounts of greenhouse gasses when they burn or melt.

The burning of those landscapes in 2021 helped drive carbon emissions from global forest loss to 2.5 gigatons, about the equivalent of annual fossil fuel emissions in coal-dependent India, the Forest Watch report found. 

In landscapes from Siberia to the Amazon, that risks “creating a feedback loop in which increasing fires and carbon emissions reinforce each other and lead to worsening condition,” the study found.

This is a situation that 141 nations committed to avert at last year’s COP26 Climate Change Conference in Glasgow, when they agreed to “halt and reverse forest loss by 2030.”