New global study finds forest loss caused by industrial agriculture staggering | Science

A new analysis of global forest loss – the first to examine not only or the forests are disappearing, but also Why– reveals how much industrial agriculture contributes to the loss. The answer: some 5 million hectares – the region of Costa Rica – every year. And despite years of corporate pledges to help reduce deforestation, the amount of cleared forest to plant oil palms and other booming crops remained stable between 2001 and 2015.

Daniel Nepstad, a tropical ecologist and director of the Earth Innovation Institute, a nonprofit organization in San Francisco, California, says corporate commitments are not enough to protect forests from agriculture.

Researchers already had a comprehensive picture of forest loss and regrowth. In 2013, a team led by Matthew Hansen, Remote Sensing Expert at the University of Maryland at College Park, released high resolution maps of forest changes between 2000 and 2012 from satellite images. But the maps, available online, did not reveal where deforestation was taking place – the permanent loss of forests -.

For the new analysis, Philip Curtis, a geospatial analyst working with the Sustainability Consortium, a nonprofit organization based in Fayetteville, Arkansas, has formed a computer program to recognize five causes of forest loss agriculture, small-scale agriculture and urbanization . To teach the software, Curtis spent weeks looking at thousands of Google Earth images showing deforestation with a known cause. "It was one of the hardest parts of the job," he says, especially in Southeast Asia. "The magnitude of the loss was staggering."

The decisions of the program were based on the mathematical properties of the images, which can help distinguish larger forms of industrial agriculture from smaller and more irregular fields of subsistence agriculture, for example. In total, about 27% of the total losses between 2001 and 2015 were due to large-scale farming and livestock, Curtis and his colleagues report today. Science. This agriculture includes industrial plantations of palm oil, a valuable biofuel and a major ingredient in food, cosmetics and others. Cleared forests for these plantations have definitely disappeared, while cleared forests for other purposes, including small-scale farms, are generally growing back. (Urbanization, also a permanent conversion, accounted for only 1% of the total forest loss.)

Deforestation due to commodity-based agriculture remained stable between 2001 and 2015, following the analysis. But trends vary by region. In Brazil, vast expanses of Amazon rainforest have been cut for cattle farms or soya farms. The good news is that the deforestation rate halved between 2004 and 2009, due to the enforcement of environmental laws, pressure from soy buyers and other factors. But in Malaysia and elsewhere in Southeast Asia, laws against deforestation are often lacking or poorly enforced, and more and more forests have been cut for palm oil plantations. "We have known that [was happening]but we do not have the numbers to show it consistently around the world, "says Curtis.

Falling trees

Nepstad says that despite the success of corporate commitments that slow down deforestation in the Amazon, the situation is daunting. Many companies have pledged to support "zero deforestation" by not buying palm oil or other commodities from recently cleared plantations or farms. But, out of 473 such commitments, the Earth Innovation Institute recently analyzed only 155 deforestation targets for their supply chains by 2020. Only 49 companies reported making good progress.

"The company's commitments have been difficult to implement and some companies simply do not want to do much," says Nepstad. Lisa Rausch, a geographer at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, points out that it can be difficult for companies to find suppliers with verifiable sources of products without deforestation.