Global forest destruction continues despite COP26 deforestation pledge

Destruction of the world’s remaining intact forests continued in 2021 at a rate barely changed in recent years, despite more than 100 countries at the COP26 climate summit pledging to end deforestation this decade.

Around 3.75 million hectares of tree cover disappeared across intact or “primary” humid tropical forests in 2021, new satellite data from Global Forest Watch shows. This equates to the area of 10 football pitches a minute. Global Forest Watch, an initiative of the World Resources Institute (WRI) with partners including the University of Maryland, estimates that this tropical forest loss released 2.5 billion tonnes of carbon emissions – on a par with India’s annual emissions.

Much of last year’s logging and burning in these forests happened ahead of the promise at the summit in the UK last November to halt deforestation by 2030, so the new figures could act as a baseline. But Mikaela Weisse at the WRI says tropical forest loss has been consistently high in recent years, suggesting the new target will be challenging: “2030 is going to come really fast. We will need to see very dramatic declines across the board if we want to get to zero by then,” she says.

Brazil, where exploitation of …