Loggers, some of them acting illegally, also build roads to access more and more remote forests-which leads to further deforestation. Logging operations, which provide the world’s wood and paper products, also fell countless trees each year. In the Amazon, cattle ranching and farms-particularly soy plantations-are key culprits. In Malaysia and Indonesia, forests are cut down to make way for producing palm oil, which can be found in everything from shampoo to saltines. Forestry practices, wildfires and, in small part, urbanization account for the rest. Photograph by Paul Nicklen, Nat Geo Image Collection Causes of deforestationįarming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation. Climate change has accelerated the rate of ice loss across the continent. Tropical tree cover alone can provide 23 percent of the climate mitigation needed over the next decade to meet goals set in the Paris Agreement in 2015, according to one estimate.Īn iceberg melts in the waters off Antarctica. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change. We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale, but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. The organization Amazon Conservation reports that destruction rose by 21 percent in 2020, a loss the size of Israel. About 17 percent of the Amazonian rainforest has been destroyed over the past 50 years, and losses recently have been on the rise.
Since 1990, the world has lost 420 million hectares or about a billion acres of forest, according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations-mainly in Africa and South America.
Yet the mass destruction of trees-deforestation-continues, sacrificing the long-term benefits of standing trees for short-term gain.įorests still cover about 30 percent of the world’s land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. As the world seeks to slow the pace of climate change, preserve wildlife, and support billions of people, trees inevitably hold a major part of the answer.
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