According to a report, around 4.1 million hectares of tropical jungle were destroyed worldwide in the past year. This means that forest with an area of Switzerland has been lost – to a lesser extent due to fires, but mainly due to other reasons such as deforestation.
The equivalent of tree populations the size of eleven soccer fields disappeared every minute, according to a new calculation by the World Resources Institute (WRI) in Washington, which was published on Tuesday. According to the report, the total area of tropical jungle destroyed within a year was only larger in 2016, 2017 and 2020 over the past 20 years. Last year, ten percent more tropical jungle was destroyed than in 2021, when it was around 3.75 million hectares.
The tropical forests in Brazil and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo continue to be particularly badly affected. After the Amazon rainforest, the Congo Basin is the largest remaining tropical forest area – and one of the most extraordinary ecosystems in the world. The “lungs of Africa” extend from the Democratic Republic of the Congo to the neighboring countries of Gabon, Cameroon, Central African Republic, Equatorial Guinea and the Republic of the Congo. According to the nature conservation organization WWF, there are around 10,000 species of tropical plants in the Congo Basin, almost a third of which only occur in this region.
Thanks to this diverse, dense vegetation, the rainforest of the Congo Basin is one of the most important carbon sinks in the world. This means that the forest removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere – according to scientists from the University of Leeds 1.5 billion tons a year. At the same time, large amounts of oil and natural gas are suspected to be in the Congo Basin. The Congolese government wants to promote this in the future and, despite protests from nature and climate protectionists, announced corresponding projects last year.
Forest loss has increased most in Ghana, Bolivia and Angola, WRI said. Indonesia and Malaysia, among others, could have kept the loss of their forests at a low level.
With the help of the Global Forest Watch platform, numerous nature conservation organizations under the leadership of the WRI have been observing changes in forest landscapes worldwide since 2014, using satellite technology, among other things. The WRI compiled the report based on this every year together with researchers from the University of Maryland.
Primeval forest, i.e. natural forest largely untouched by humans, is of great importance for the preservation of biodiversity and is particularly important for the storage of carbon dioxide – CO₂ for short. The authors of the study calculated that the area destroyed in 2022 released 2.7 billion tons of CO₂. This roughly corresponds to the annual emissions from fossil fuels in India.