Destruction of forest around the roads has fueled a “sharp spike” in tree loss in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest, with the rate of non-fire related casualties rising by more than 25% in some areas, researchers have found.
“It’s not necessarily a new phenomenon to see forest loss around roads,” said Mikaela Weisse, deputy director of Global Forest Watch at the World Resources Institute, which released the data. “What’s new this year, or has been intensified, is the rate of this loss.”
Western Brazil has been particularly hard hit, the researchers found in their annual report. New hotspots appeared in the more accessible areas of the forests, close to roads, that were likely being cleared to create pastures, they said.
In the Amazon, some roads were paved for the first time, making the forest easier to access and clear, the researchers found. “An interesting question is, do roads cause deforestation or is it the incentive to clear that is creating roads?” asked Weisse.
Brazil accounted for more than 40% of the global loss of primary forests in the tropics last year, roughly the same rate as the year before. The country topped the global list of tropical primary forest loss: about 1.5 million hectares, an area roughly the size of the Bahamas, according to the University of Maryland (USA), which compiled the data.
Ending deforestation has been identified by experts as a crucial step in reducing carbon emissions. Stopping the destructive practice globally could prevent 3.6 gigatons of carbon dioxide from being emitted from today to 2050, says the report on the state of the world’s forests by the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO).
South America was the region with the greatest potential for carbon savings, according to FAO. Planting trees on degraded land around the world could also remove about 1.2 gigatons of carbon by 2050, he added.
Globally, the amount of tropical primary forest lost in 2021 dropped slightly, to about 3.75 million hectares, an area larger than that of Belgium, with the rate remaining stable since 2018, the Maryland researchers found.
These total losses resulted in 2.5 gigatons of carbon pollution, a volume roughly equivalent to India’s annual emissions, they estimated.
Indonesia proved to be a rare bright spot, where the rate of tree loss declined for the fifth year in a row, falling by 25% compared to 2020. However, it still ranked fourth in the list of countries for tropical tree loss.
More than 140 countries, including Brazil, agreed to halt and reverse forest loss at last year’s COP26 summit in Glasgow (Scotland). But deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a 15-year peak in the 12 months to July 2021, according to the National Institute for Space Research.
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This week, FAO said that the expansion of agricultural land, including oil palm plantations, was the “main driver of deforestation”, responsible for about half of the practice worldwide. Cattle raising was also a driver, accounting for just over a third.
