Reuters

February 25, 2021
The rate of destruction of the world’s tropical forests is likely to have gathered pace last year, green groups warned, as the pandemic weakened environmental regulations, cut funding for protection work and forced city migrants back to rural areas.

In 2019, tropical rainforests disappeared at a rate of one football pitch every six seconds, according to monitoring service Global Forest Watch (GFW), despite more awareness of the key role of carbon-storing forests in slowing climate change.

The tracking platform, which uses satellite imagery and is run by the U.S.-based think-tank World Resources Institute (WRI), is due to release its deforestation numbers for 2020 - when the COVID-19 pandemic struck - in the next three months.

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Forest Peoples Programme

February 18, 2021
In their quest to bolster economies battered by the pandemic, governments in Brazil, Colombia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Indonesia, and Peru have set aside social and environmental safeguards in favor of destructive development projects that are harming Indigenous communities and the forests they care for, according to a report released today by Forest Peoples Programme.

Open-pit mines, industrial agriculture plantations, infrastructure mega-schemes and hydropower complexes are among the projects fueling a rise in human rights abuses and deforestation in five countries that contain the majority of the world’s tropical forests.

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Earth.Com

February 12, 2021
A new study from Oregon State University has found that while the rate of deforestation is reduced in protected areas, it is still not prevented. Considering that most terrestrial species live in forests, deforestation has major implications for future biodiversity loss.

“Evidence indicates that we’re in the middle of a mass extinction event the likes of which the planet has seen only five times before,” said study leader Christopher Wolf. “Formally protected areas have been proposed as a primary tool for reducing deforestation, and therefore stemming species extinctions and slowing reductions in carbon storage.”

The research is believed to represent the first comprehensive look at how effective protected areas are at limiting forest loss. The investigation was focused on more than 18,000 land parcels spanning two million square miles across 63 countries.

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The Guardian

August 30, 2020
Scientists are to warn world leaders that increasing numbers of deadly new pandemics will afflict the planet if levels of deforestation and biodiversity loss continue at their current catastrophic rates.

A UN summit on biodiversity, scheduled to be held in New York next month, will be told by conservationists and biologists there is now clear evidence of a strong link between environmental destruction and the increased emergence of deadly new diseases such as Covid-19.

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Mongabay

August 28, 2020
Despite surging forest fires and deforestation in Earth’s largest rainforest, Brazil’s Ministry of the Environment announced it will suspend all operations to combat illegal deforestation and fire in the Amazon and Pantanal on Monday, August 31.

In a statement published on its official web site, the ministry said it would demobilize staff and resources across two agencies: the environmental protection agency IBAMA and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio). The suspension affects 1,805 firefighters, 401 inspectors, six helicopters, 144 vehicles, and ten aircraft.

The ministry said the decision is a product of a federal budget cut of 60.6 million Brazilian reais ($11.26 million).

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Scientific American

May 1, 2020
SARS, Ebola and now SARS-CoV-2: all three of these highly infectious viruses have caused global panic since 2002—and all three of them jumped to humans from wild animals that live in dense tropical forests.

Three quarters of the emerging pathogens that infect humans leaped from animals, many of them creatures in the forest habitats that we are slashing and burning to create land for crops, including biofuel plants, and for mining and housing. The more we clear, the more we come into contact with wildlife that carries microbes well suited to kill us—and the more we concentrate those animals in smaller areas where they can swap infectious microbes, raising the chances of novel strains. Clearing land also reduces biodiversity, and the species that survive are more likely to host illnesses that can be transferred to humans. All these factors will lead to more spillover of animal pathogens into people.

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