According to the RFN analysis, logging and land conversion – mainly for agriculture – have wiped out 34 percent of the rainforests and degraded another 30 percent, making them more vulnerable to fires and devastation in the future.
It is worrying news. in the first place Because it only shows how quickly rainforests are disappearing, which is a critical barrier against climate change. But also because losing the forest can “spur” global warming: Dr.The dense tropical vegetation is the largest living reservoir of carbon, the main greenhouse gas. This “horrific episode” in turn will make it harder for the remaining forest to survive, says Anders Krug, researcher and The author of the report.
Rainforests disappeared in 2019 at a steady rate similar to what they did twenty years ago. According to another recent report World Resources Institute A plot of land the size of a football field is lost every six seconds. The RFN report notes that in total, between 2002 and 2019, a larger area disappeared from France. The Amazon and the surrounding rainforest, or the so-called “lungs of the Earth,” were victims of more than half of this devastation.
Amazon jungle
The Amazon region in particular has been hit hard in recent decades. The sharp increase in agriculture has urged farmers and speculators to set fire to rainforest areas to provide land for soybeans and livestock, among other things. Things went from bad to worse in 2019, when far-right President Jair Bolsonaro was elected and began relaxing all sorts of environmental laws.
There is no place on Earth where rainforests are lost more than Brazil. However, the hope of preserving the remaining forest is the most evident there is, according to Krogh. The Amazon rainforest and its neighbors – the Orinoco rainforests and tropical Andean forests – account for 73.5 percent of the pristine rainforests on our planet.
Some go to second place collectively for the destruction of tropical rainforests since 2002 The islands of Southeast Asia – chief among them Indonesia – are mainly exchanged forests with palm oil plantations. The “bronze” of Central Africa. There, the destruction mainly occurs around the Congo River, where traditional and commercial agriculture, along with logging, is causing the most damage to the rainforest.
