VAST tracts of pristine rainforest on three continents went up in smoke last year, with an area roughly the size of Switzerland cut down or burned to make way for cattle and commercial crops, said researchers today.

Brazil accounted for more than a third of the loss, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia a distant second and third, said Global Forest Watch in its annual report, based on satellite data.

The 38,000 sq km destroyed in 2019 – equivalent to a football pitch of old-growth trees every six seconds – made it the third most devastating year for primary forests since the scientists began tracking their decline two decades ago.

“We are concerned that the rate of loss is so high despite all the efforts of different countries and companies to reduce deforestation,” lead researcher Mikaela Weisse, who is Global Forest Watch project manager at the World Resources Institute (WRI), told AFP.

The total area of tropical forests levelled by fires and bulldozers worldwide last year was in fact three times higher, but virgin rainforests, as they were once known, are especially precious.

Undisturbed by modern development, they harbour the richest diversity of wildlife on Earth, and keep huge stores of carbon locked in their woody mass.

When set ablaze, that carbon escapes into the atmosphere as planet-warming CO2.

“It will take decades or even centuries for these forests to get back to their original state,” assuming, of course, that the land they once covered is left undisturbed, said Weisse.

The forest fires that engulfed parts of Brazil last year made front-page news as the climate crisis loomed large in the public eye.

But, they were not the main cause of Brazil’s loss of primary forests, the data showed.

Satellite images revealed many new “hotspots” of forest destruction. In the state of Para, for instance, these fire-ravaged zones corresponded with reports of illegal land-grabs in the Trincheira/Bacaja indigenous reserve.

Rare bright spot

And that was before President Jair Bolsonaro’s government proposed legislation to relax restrictions within these nominally protected regions on commercial mining, oil and gas extraction, and large-scale agriculture – all of which could make such incursions even more common.

Frances Seymour, a senior fellow at WRI, said this is not only unjust for the people who have lived in Brazil’s rainforests for uncounted generations, but also bad management.

“We know that deforestation is lower in indigenous territories.

“A mounting body of evidence suggests that legal recognition of indigenous land rights provides greater forest protection.”

The Covid-19 pandemic may also make things worse, not just in Brazil – which has been hit especially hard by the disease – but anywhere it saps the already anaemic enforcement capacities of tropical-forest nations.

“Anecdotal reports of increased levels of illegal logging, mining, poaching and other forest crimes are streaming in from all over the world,” said Seymour.

Neighbouring Bolivia saw unprecedented tree-cover loss last year – 80% higher than any year on record – due to fires, both within primary forests and surrounding woodlands.

Soy production and cattle ranching were the two main drivers.

Indonesia, meanwhile, showed a 5% drop in the area of forests – 3,240 sq km – destroyed in 2019, the third consecutive year of decline, and nearly three times less than the peak year of 2016.

“Indonesia has been one of the few bright spots in the global data on tropical deforestation over the last few years,” said Seymour and two colleagues in a recent blog post.

Tropical ecosystems are vulnerable to both climate change and extractive exploitation.

A study in March calculated that the Amazon rainforest is nearing a threshold of deforestation that once crossed, will see it morph into an arid savannah within half a century.

The other countries with the most severe loss of primary forests in 2019 were Peru (1,620 sq km), Malaysia (1,200 sq km) and Colombia (1,150 sq km), followed by Laos, Mexico and Cambodia, all with less than 800 sq km. – AFP, June 2, 2020.