The biodiversity of managed tree plantations which are periodically cut, regrown, cut again, then regrown is not the same. But, overall, oilseeds and beef tend to top the list for most countries. But it was then that England reached its transition point and since then, forests have doubled in size. Stage 4 The Post-Transition phase is when countries have passed the transition point and are now gaining forest again. Some interesting facts state that every second, 1.5 acres of wood are cut down, How many trees are cut down each year in the Amazon rainforest? In Latin America and Southeast Asia in particular, commodity-driven deforestation mainly the clearance of forests to grow crops such as palm oil and soy, and pasture for beef production accounts for almost two-thirds of forest loss. Deforestation and forest degradation are responsible for around 15% of all greenhouse gas emissions. How many trees are cut down each year? Within this global aggregated trend there are many forest transitions at local, national or regional levels occurring. How Many Trees are Cut down for Paper Each Year . How much deforestation happens every day? Forestry production and wildfires usually result in forest degradation the forest experiences short-term disturbance but if left alone is likely to regrow. The latter will experience short-term environmental impacts, but will ultimately regrow. Then things started to speed up. Across Africa, fuelwood and charcoal played a much larger role it accounted for more than half (52%). By Georgina Rannard. How many trees are lost to deforestation each year? These countries might have high levels of afforestation at home, but theyre still having a net negative impact on the size of the worlds forests. From 1700 to 1850, 19 million hectares were being cleared every decade. Thats a lot of trees! The research says 15.3 billion trees are chopped down every year. It provides long-term estimates on forest cover in 10,000 and 5,000 years BP. It assumes the impact of clearing primary rainforest in the Amazon to produce soybeans is the same as logging planted forests in the UK. This is very close to our estimate of a one-third loss. In the chart we see the comparison between the change in domestic forest area, and deforestation driven by imported goods.33 On the vertical axis we have the domestic change in forest area: this is shown only for countries where the forest area is increasing. In the article we will look at the reasons we lose forest; how these can be differentiated in a useful way; and what this means for understanding our priorities in tackling forest loss. One of the reasons poorer countries clear forest to make room for farmland is that they achieve low crop yields. https://doi.org/10.4060/ca8753en. Humanitys biggest footprint is due to what we eat, not where we live. Because people are starting to see how climate change affects trees. Today, most deforestation occurs in the tropics. Forests still cover about 30 percent of the worlds land area, but they are disappearing at an alarming rate. Types and rates of forest disturbance in Brazilian Legal Amazon, 20002013. Growing all those trees requires about 19.7 square miles of land. But it can bridge between deforestation and degradation depending on the timeframe and permanence of these agricultural practices. This is nearly always true of planted forests in temperate regions there, planted forests are long-established and do not replace primary existing forests. Classifying drivers of global forest loss. It was a net exporter. Another way that richer countries can contribute is by investing in technologies such as improved seed varieties, fertilizers and agricultural practices that allow farmers to increase yields. Stage 2 The Early Transition phase is when countries start to lose forests very rapidly. Lets take a look at which countries are causing deforestation overseas and the size of this impact. But when forests are cut, burned or otherwise removed they emit carbon instead of absorb carbon. It also estimates that 46% of the worlds trees have been cleared over the past 12,000 years. What if this deforestation is being driven by consumers elsewhere? Pre-1961 land use is sourced from the work of Ellis et al. Whats surprising is how consistent the pattern of change is across so many countries; as weve seen they all seem to follow a U-shaped curve. All other material, including data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data, is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. Increasing human dominance of tropical forests. 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. Ellis, E. C., Beusen, A. H., & Goldewijk, K. K. (2020). International trade is important for socioeconomic development. Americans cut down 15,094,678 Christmas trees in 2017, according to the most recent year of data from the U.S. Agriculture Department. The researchers found that 36 million trees are cut down in urban areas each year, and 167,000 acres of impervious areas (concrete, asphalt, etc.) You have the permission to use, distribute, and reproduce these in any medium, provided the source and authors are credited. In just over 100 years the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years. A new study published in Nature estimates the planet has 3.04 trillion trees. Brazil and Indonesia alone account for almost half. To understand this more recent loss of forest, lets zoom in on the last 300 years. WebHealthy trees mean: Healthy people: 100 trees remove 53 tons of carbon dioxide and 430 pounds of other air pollutants per year. Forest loss or tree loss captures two fundamental impacts on forest cover: deforestation and forest degradation. It doesnt capture trees that are cut down in planted forests; the land is still forested, its now just regrowing forest. We should not only look at where these foods are produced, but also where the consumer demand is coming from. Rather than looking at total figures by country [if youre interested, we have mapped them here] we have calculated the per capita footprint. By 1900, there were 1.65 billion people in the world (five times fewer than we have today) but for most of the previous period, humans were deforesting the world with only tens or hundreds of millions. This is also true for major economies such as China and India. Increasing human dominance of tropical forests. Each year, an estimated 15 billion trees are cut down around the world. Please consult our full legal disclaimer. Growing all those trees requires about 19.7 square miles of land. We need to pass the transition point as soon as possible, while minimising the amount of forest we lose along the way. Help us do this work by making a donation. The consumption choices of people in these countries cause deforestation elsewhere in the world. Improvements in agricultural productivity tends to both drive and follow economic growth. Forest cover falls quickly, and the annual loss of forest is high. Global deforestation peaked in the 1980s. This demand for resources and land is not always driven by domestic markets. The carbon footprint of diets across the EU vary from country-to-country, and estimates vary depending on how much land use change is factored into these figures. This rapid swapping of green for gray is harmful to the people living in these spaces, and it sets cities up for long-term environmental decline, according to the scientists. Net forest loss is not the same as deforestation it measures deforestation plus any gains in forest over a given period. In the chart here we see the breakdown of deforestation emissions by product for each consumer country. 59% occurs in Latin America, with a further 28% from Southeast Asia. Environmental Research Letters, 14(5), 055003. But not all of it is to produce products for local markets. Most deforestation today occurs in low-to-middle income countries. What activities are driving this? are added every year. This might paint a bleak picture for the future of the worlds forests: the United Nations projects that the global population will continue to grow, reaching 10.8 billion by 2100. 14% of deforestation is driven by consumers in the worlds richest countries we import beef, vegetable oils, cocoa, coffee and paper that has been produced on deforested land.12. Thats an area the size of the United Kingdom. The research says 15.3 billion trees are chopped down every year. Not all forest is equal. The global population at this time was small and growing very slowly there were fewer than 50 million people in the world. 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. Centuries ago it was mainly temperate regions that were driving global deforestation [we take a look at this longer history of deforestation in a related article]. For the past 30 years, temperate regions have seen a continued increase in forest cover through afforestation: you see this as the bars are now positive (pointing upwards). However, most align on the relative change in forests over this period. Historical data pre-1990 is sourced from Michael Williams book, Deforesting the Earth: from prehistory to global crisis. Maxwell, S. L., Fuller, R. A., Brooks, T. M., & Watson, J. E. (2016). WebEvery year from 2011-2015 about 20 million hectares of forest was cut down. Tropical forests are often more productive than temperate forests, meaning they store more carbon. The researchers found that 36 million trees are cut down in urban areas each year, and 167,000 acres of impervious areas (concrete, asphalt, etc.) According to CNN, each year over 1,000 plants and animal species go extinct due to deforestation and subsequent habitat loss. From this understanding we can define five reasons why we lose forests: Thanks to satellite imagery, we can get a birds-eye view of what these drivers look like from above. Lewis, S. L., Edwards, D. P., & Galbraith, D. (2015). This interactive map shows deforestation rates across the world. Today, only 4 billion hectares are left. 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. Hosonuma, N., Herold, M., De Sy, V., De Fries, R. S., Brockhaus, M., Verchot, L., & Romijn, E. (2012). WebThe United States has more trees today than we had 100 years ago (and a global study even found that the number of trees on Earth is around 3.04 trillion, a much higher number than previously believed.) University of Chicago Press.FAO (2020). Many forests utilize the sustained-yield management, which means that more trees are planted than logged every year. We need more fuelwood to cook, more houses to live in, and importantly, more food to eat. Approximately 3.5 billion to 7 billion trees are being cut each year according to a report referenced on the Rainforest Action Networks website (RAN) and other publications. We can calculate this increase as [(7.63 billion 3.09 billion) / 3.09 billion * 100 = 147%]. Our articles and data visualizations rely on work from many different people and organizations. To do this, they quantified where deforestation was occurring due to the expansion of croplands, pasture and tree plantations (for logging), and what commodities were produced on this converted land. (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. International trade was responsible for around one-third (29%) of these emissions. Web42 million trees are cut down each day. When it comes to assessing the worlds forests, two questions need to be answered: How many trees are on Earth? and. After long periods of forest clearance in the past, most of todays richest countries are increasing tree cover through afforestation. Stage 1 The Pre-Transition phase is defined by having high levels of forest cover and no or only very slow losses over time. Our World In Data is a project of the Global Change Data Lab, a registered charity in England and Wales (Charity Number 1186433). But the magnitude of these impacts are often less than the complete conversion of forest. The data produced by third parties and made available by Our World in Data is subject to the license terms from the original third-party authors. Thats a lot of trees! 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. This shifting agriculture category can be difficult to allocate between deforestation and degradation: it often requires close monitoring over time to understand how permanent these agricultural practices are. Since agriculture is responsible for 60 to 80% of it, what we eat, where its sourced from, and how it is produced is our strongest lever to bring deforestation to an end. In a previous post we looked at this change in global forests over the long-run. They cut down their forests and replaced it with agricultural land long ago. Urbanization, the other driver of deforestation accounts for just 0.6%. In the chart we see deforestation emissions per person, measured in tonnes of CO2 per year. Deforesting the earth: from prehistory to global crisis. We can illustrate this through the so-called Forest Transition Model.14 This is shown in the chart. 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. Nature, 525(7568), 201-205. Rudel, T. K. (1998). Explore palm oil production across the world, and its impacts on the environment. 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. It also estimates that 46% of the worlds trees have been cleared over the past 12,000 years. Many countries have followed this classic U-shaped pattern. Approximately 3.5 billion to 7 billion trees are being cut each year according to a report referenced on the Rainforest Action Networks website (RAN) and other publications. When we treat these impacts equally we make it difficult to prioritize our efforts in the fight against deforestation. Habitat loss is the leading driver of global biodiversity loss.25 When we cut down rainforests we are destroying the habitats of many unique species, and reshaping these ecosystems permanently. People cut down 15 billion trees each year and the global tree count has fallen by 46% since the beginning of human civilization. WebThe UN FAO estimate that 10 million hectares of forest were cut down each year. How much deforestation happens every day? This explains historical trends we see for countries across the world today. Data from 1990 onwards is sourced from the UNs 2020 Global Forest Resources Assessment 2020.References:Williams, M. (2003). Deforestation was therefore responsible for [2.6 / 40.2 * 100 = 6.5%]. Mather, A. S. (2004). Humans have been cutting down trees for millennia. 38. 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. Many countries have not only ended deforestation, but actually achieved substantial reforestation. Lewis, S. L., Edwards, D. P., & Galbraith, D. (2015). In the chart we see historical reconstructions of country-level data on the share of land covered by forest (over decades, centuries or even millennia depending on the country). But its not the case for deforestation. 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. Economic development and forest cover: evidence from satellite data. National Inventory of Woodland and Trees, England (2001). How Many Acres of Trees Are Cut Down Each Year? As to the number of trees this represents, its impossible to get an accurate count. Today thats just 34%. Most deforestation occurs for the production of goods that are consumed within domestic markets. If we can take advantage of these innovations, we can bring deforestation to an end. Brazil, in contrast, caused more deforestation domestically in the production of goods for other countries than it imported from elsewhere. We manage to capture some of these differences in carbon in our related article on deforestation emissions embedded in trade. One option is to adopt stricter guidelines on what suppliers to source from, and implementing zero-deforestation policies that stop the trade of goods that have been produced on deforested land. Nature Sustainability, 1-9. If you struggle to increase crop yields but want to produce more food, then expanding your agricultural land is the only option. In the map we see their assessment of each countrys stage in the transition. Environmental Research Letters, 7(4), 044009. The United Nations, as well as experts at the World Wildlife Fund and Global Forest Watch, found that one million animals are in danger of extinction as a result of how much deforestation has occurred. 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