Our World in Data is free and accessible for everyone. Healthy environment: One hundred mature trees catch about 139,000 gallons of rainwater per year. Absolute estimates of forest cover from other sources may differ for this reason. Countries that lie along this line would have a net-neutral impact on global forests: the area they are causing to deforestation overseas is exactly as large as the area they are regrowing at home. Because people are starting to see how climate change affects trees. In Latin America and Asia the dominant driver of degradation was logging for products such as timber, paper and pulp this accounted for more than 70%. The breakdown of forest loss globally, and by region, is shown in the chart.22. (2019) quantified the deforestation embedded in traded goods between countries.30 They did this by calculating the amount of deforestation associated with specific food and forestry products, and combining it with a trade model. In the chart here we see the breakdown of deforestation emissions by product for each consumer country. [1] That's 15.3 billion every year. (2020).References:FAO and UNEP. Healthy communities: Tree-filled neighborhoods lower levels of domestic violence and are safer and more sociable. But most emissions are driven by domestic markets this means policies in the major producer countries will be key to tackling this problem. Thats around half the size of Germany. How do these two measures compare? The rate of deforestation is declining, but we still lost forests at a whopping 10 million hectares per year between 2015-2020. Scientific Reports, 7, 40678. How much deforestation happens every day? Given the current estimate of the total tree cover on the planet, that could equate to about 0.11% of trees being cut each year. But not all of it is to produce products for local markets. I have reconstructed long-term data using various studies which Ive documented here. It also estimates that 46% of the worlds trees have been cleared over the past 12,000 years. Nearly all 95% of this deforestation occurs in the tropics. The average across the EU was 0.3 tonnes CO2 per person. [1] That's 15.3 billion every year. By Georgina Rannard. Most traded emissions are embedded in soy and palm oil exports to China and India; and beef, soy and palm oil exports to Europe. According to the Environmental Paper Network, an estimated 30% of felled trees are used for paper products. University of Chicago Press. People cut down 15 billion trees each year and the global tree count has fallen by 46% since the beginning of human civilization. At the beginning of this phase, the forest area is at its lowest point. (2012) gathered this data from a range of sources including country submissions as part of their REDD+ readiness activities, Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR) country profiles, UNFCCC national communications and scientific studies. Africa is also different here. This is because the latter only captures deforestation the replacement of forest with another land use (such as cropland). Hosonuma et al. In the figure we see visual examples from the study of forest loss classification by Philip Curtis et al. Forest transition theory and the reforesting of Scotland. In a related article we look in much more detail at what agricultural products, and which countries are driving this. Thats equivalent to the area of South Africa. Many countries have much less forest today than they did in the past. How many trees are cut down each year? For this reason, data sources including the UN Food and Agriculture Organization tend to aggregate annual losses as the average over five-year or decadal periods. Healthy communities: Tree-filled neighborhoods lower levels of domestic violence and are safer and more sociable. It will be possible for our generation to achieve the same on the global scale and bring the 10,000 year history of forest loss to an end. Rather than looking at total figures by country [if youre interested, we have mapped them here] we have calculated the per capita footprint. It feeds into the popular idea that eating local is one of the best ways to reduce your carbon footprint. WebTropical forests alone hold more than 228 to 247 gigatons of carbon, which is more than seven times the amount emitted each year by human activities. Forest loss or tree loss captures two fundamental impacts on forest cover: deforestation and forest degradation. High-income countries were the largest importers of deforestation, accounting for 40% of it. It also estimates that 46% of the worlds trees have been cleared over the past 12,000 years. Since international demand is driving one-third of deforestation emissions, we have some opportunity to reduce emissions through global consumers and supply chains. Proactive conservation to prevent habitat losses to agricultural expansion. Weve seen the five key drivers of forest loss. But, overall, oilseeds and beef tend to top the list for most countries. The Asia-Pacific region predominantly Indonesia and Malaysia export a higher share: 44%. For example, the US imported 64,000 hectares of deforested land, but increased its domestic forest area by 275,000 hectares. Can we bring it to an end? Is there a forest transition? [4] Forests cover 4.06 billion hectares (just less than 31%) of Africas emissions are high because people are clearing forests to produce more food. Why? The 11-month balance shows that 1,539,970 trees were cut down each day, which means 1,059 trees per minute or almost 18 trees per second. Web42 million trees are cut down each day. Deforestation rates accelerated. Loss of Biodiversity: Forests are the only liveable habitat for a variety of species around the globe many of which have not even have been discovered. Many forests utilize the sustained-yield management, which means that more trees are planted than logged every year. As mentioned above, about 15 billion trees are cut down each year. The remaining 73% came from the three drivers of forest degradation: logging of forestry products from plantations (26%); shifting, local agriculture (24%); and wildfires (23%). How many trees are cut down each year in the Amazon rainforest? Not only would this be bad for people, it might also be bad for forests. All the software and code that we write is open source and made available via GitHub under the permissive MIT license. This topic page can be cited as: All visualizations, data, and code produced by Our World in Data are completely open access under the Creative Commons BY license. As mentioned above, about 15 billion trees are cut down each year. The turn of the 20th century is when global forest loss reached the halfway point: half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900; the other half occurred in the last century alone. That is why we should be focusing on tropical deforestation. Cutting them down disrupts or destroys established, species-rich ecosystems. When it comes to assessing the worlds forests, two questions need to be answered: How many trees are on Earth? and. The world has lost one-third of its forests, but an end of deforestation is possible. The number of trees cut down in the Brazilian Amazon in January far exceeded deforestation for the same month last year, according to government satellite data. There is some bad news, though: that number is likely to increase by 20% by 2023. In contrast, most forest degradation two-thirds of it occurs in temperate countries. A new study published in Nature estimates the planet has 3.04 trillion trees. (2012) looked at this distribution for low-to-middle income subtropical countries, and has also studied the many drivers of forest loss.Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., & Romijn, E. (2012). This is very close to our estimate of a one-third loss. Loss of Biodiversity: Forests are the only liveable habitat for a variety of species around the globe many of which have not even have been discovered. Urbanization, the other driver of deforestation accounts for just 0.6%. Tropical forests are often more productive than temperate forests, meaning they store more carbon. 38. If poorer countries are cutting down forests to make food for rich consumers, then we should just stop trading these goods. 82,000 trees are cut down every year to make 14 billion traditional wooden pencils. The total cut down so far is over 470 million trees since January 1st. I have therefore excluded these categories so we can focus on how habitable land is used. Ellis, E. C., Beusen, A. H., & Goldewijk, K. K. (2020). This is calculated by taking each countrys imported deforestation and subtracting its exported deforestation. Nature, 525(7568), 201-205. You will notice in the chart that this was not only expanding into previously forested land, but also other land uses such as wild grasslands and shrubbery. Instead of using wood for fuel we switch to fossil fuels, or hopefully, more renewables and nuclear energy. This demand for resources and land is not always driven by domestic markets. How many trees are lost to deforestation each year? We know where deforestation emissions are occurring, and where this demand is coming from. This highlights an important point: less than 20% of people in Sub-Saharan Africa have access to clean fuels for cooking, meaning they still rely on wood and charcoal. Forest degradation measures a thinning of the canopy a reduction in the density of trees in the area but without a change in land use. Countries such as Indonesia, Myanmar, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are in the early transition phase and are losing forests quickly. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the worlds land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Noriko Hosonuma et al. Humanitys biggest footprint is due to what we eat, not where we live. Some of the worlds poorest countries are still in the pre-transition phase. Maxwell, S. L., Fuller, R. A., Brooks, T. M., & Watson, J. E. (2016). As of 2020, the UN estimates the planet is losing over 7,000,000 hectares per year to deforestation.27Between 1990 and 2015, the world lost 129 million hectares of forest an area about the size of South Africa.11 Natural forests lost by continent9include: Africa 3.2 million hectares This is true for some problems, such as climate change. 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