France Media AgencyMar 30, 2021 9:47:47 AM IS
Rising demand in rich countries for dozens of commodities ranging from coffee to soybeans has accelerated deforestation in the tropics, researchers said Monday. Even as North America and Europe expand forest cover within their own borders, efforts to slow forest loss in the global south through compensation schemes and direct payments have been overwhelmed by that appetite, they reported in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution. The first country-specific quantification of how imports from rich nations drive deforestation found that each person in G7 countries causes an average of four trees to be lost in a different part of the world per year.
France has the highest rate of tropical deforestation per capita among affluent nations, followed by Germany, Norway, Japan, Mexico, and the United States. Photo credit: Ulet Ifansasti / Greenpeace
In 2015, the final year for which numbers were available for all of the datasets studied, which spanned more than three billion trees, the researchers found.
In five of these G7 countries – Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain and Italy – 91 to 99 percent of their “deforestation footprint” was abroad, half of them in the tropics.
That footprint has grown the fastest in China and India, but tree loss per capita is still well below that of rich nations.
“Most of the forests are in poorer countries that are overwhelmed by economic incentives to cut down,” lead author Nguyen Tien Hoang, an expert in environmental modeling and mapping at the Research Institute for People and Nature in Kyoto, told AFP. “We show that richer countries encourage deforestation through the demand for raw materials.”
Hoang and his colleague Keiichiro Kanemoto combined data on forest losses and global supply chains and showed which nations were buying which goods from where.
Cocoa and coffee
For example, cocoa consumption in Germany “poses a very high risk for forests” in the Ivory Coast and Ghana, according to Hoang.
Deforestation on the Tanzanian coast, meanwhile, is directly linked to Japanese demand for agricultural products.
In Vietnam, forest loss in the central highlands is mainly caused by coffee drinkers in the US, Germany and Italy, while in North Vietnam, exports to China, South Korea and Japan are the culprit.
Palm oil – which is used in food and biofuels – is the main contributor to forest loss in Indonesia, while large stretches of forest in Brazil are being destroyed to make way for beef, soybeans and sugar cane production.
Among the wealthy nations, France has the highest rate of tropical deforestation per capita with a loss of 21 square meters in 2015.
Germany and Norway lagged closely behind, with Japan, Mexico and the US responsible for around 16 square meters of cleared forest per capita this year, whether through incineration or timber harvest.
“The richest and most biodiverse ecosystem among forests is in the tropics,” said Hoang.
Forests cover more than 30 percent of the earth’s land surface, and tropical forests cover between 50 and 90 percent of all terrestrial species.
In 2019, a soccer field with primary, mature trees was destroyed every six seconds in the tropics – according to satellite data, a total of around 38,000 square kilometers.
Preliminary data suggest that primary forest destruction may have accelerated in 2020.
