Forests and Deforestation 2021-

The world’s 3 trillion trees, mapped
Which Countries Have the Most Trees?

‘In 10 years, we might not have forests’: DRC struggles to halt charcoal trade – a photo essay
Projects involving the Batwa and other marginalised communities offer alternative fuel and income, but can only ever be a small part of a wider drive to stop deforestation
(The Guardian) The Batwa people have lived in the region for millennia. Since the 1970s, they have been caught up in a cycle of violence in the forests, which is home to the endangered Grauer’s, or eastern lowland, gorilla. The tensions deepened in recent weeks after a German-funded investigation into alleged massacres in the park was accused of covering up accounts of rapes and killings of Batwa people, formerly known as Pygmies, by park rangers.
The rainforest of the Congo River basin covers 178m hectares (440m acres) across six countries. It absorbs about 4% of global annual carbon emissions, sustains rainfall as far away as Egypt, and is home to 80 million people – and a vast spectrum of rare animals, insects and flora. Its preservation is deemed key in the fight against global heating.
But DRC has one of the world’s highest rates of deforestation, losing 490,000 hectares (1.2m acres) of primary rainforest in 2020, according to Global Forest Watch. Unlike in the Amazon, where industrial-scale logging is mostly responsible, in DRC small-scale charcoal production and slash and burn agriculture drive deforestation; about 90% of forest loss between 2000 and 2014 was due to smallholder agriculture, according to a 2018 report in Science Advances. (Congo Basin forest loss dominated by increasing smallholder clearing)

18 June
The Amazon rainforest is disappearing quickly — and threatening Indigenous people who live there
Women and children, the main victims of deforestation
(The Conversation) A recent United Nations report reveals a strong correlation between worsening climate change and deteriorating human rights around the world.
Deforestation disproportionately affects Indigenous communities, especially women and children. It increases the pressure already placed on women to feed their children and families, while limiting their access to essential goods, including medicine.
Indeed, the health of these communities depends on access to natural medicinal products found in biodiversity. The Amazon is a major reservoir of substances used in the manufacture of several pharmaceutical products available on the South American continent.
Nearly 80 per cent of the population in developing countries relies on natural medicinal products for their primary health care. In the majority of communities, it is also women who are responsible for cultivating the land and providing transportation and water treatment.

2021

26 November
Sources: Brazil withheld deforestation data ’til COP26’s end
By DÉBORA ÁLVARESN
(AP) — Brazil’s President Jair Bolsonaro and Environment Minister Joaquim Leite both knew the Amazon region’s annual deforestation rate had surged before the U.N. climate talks in Glasgow, but kept results quiet to avoid hampering negotiations, according to three Cabinet ministers who spoke to The Associated Press on condition of anonymity.
Data from the National Institute for Space Research’s Prodes monitoring system released Thursday showed the Amazon lost 13,235 square kilometers (5,110 square miles) of rainforest in the 12-month reference period from August 2020 to July 2021. That’s up 22% from the prior 12-month period and the worst in 15 years.
The three ministers as well as a coordinator at the space institute that compiles the data, all of whom spoke with the AP on condition of anonymity due to concern about reprisals, said the annual deforestation report was available on the government’s information system before talks in Glasgow began on Oct 31.

17 November
This article was produced in partnership with the Pulitzer Center’s Rainforest Investigations Network.
How Americans’ Appetite for Leather in Luxury SUVs Worsens Amazon Deforestation
An examination of Brazil’s immense tannery industry shows how hides from illegally deforested ranches can easily reach the global marketplace. In the United States, much of the demand for Brazilian leather comes from automakers.
A New York Times investigation into Brazil’s rapidly expanding slaughterhouse industry — a business that sells not only beef to the world, but tons of leather annually to major companies in the United States and elsewhere — has identified loopholes in its monitoring systems that allow hides from cattle kept on illegally deforested Amazon land to flow undetected through Brazil’s tanneries and on to buyers worldwide.

2 November
COP26: World leaders promise to end deforestation by 2030
More than 100 world leaders have promised to end and reverse deforestation by 2030, in the COP26 climate summit’s first major deal.
Brazil – where stretches of the Amazon rainforest have been cut down – was among the signatories on Tuesday.
The pledge includes almost £14bn ($19.2bn) of public and private funds.
Experts welcomed the move, but warned a previous deal in 2014 had “failed to slow deforestation at all” and commitments needed to be delivered on.
Felling trees contributes to climate change because it depletes forests that absorb vast amounts of the warming gas CO2.
UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who is hosting the global meeting in Glasgow, said “more leaders than ever before” – a total of 110 – had made the “landmark” commitment.
Suzanne Simard on the secret societies of trees
(CBC The Current) Suzanne Simard has spent a lifetime trying to understand the secret societies of trees — how they work together, help each other and even how they speak to one another. Simard is a professor of forest ecology at the University of British Columbia. She tells us about her work, what it means for old-growth forests amid a climate emergency and her new book Finding the Mother Tree.

8 May
Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard review – a journey of passion and introspection
A root-and-branch study of the network that sustains our forests shows how all life is interconnected

6 May 2021
Suzanne Simard Changed How the World Sees Trees The pathbreaking ecologist on interspecies collaboration, tree sentience, and nature’s resilience.
By Robert Moor
(New York) Suzanne Simard has given her life to the study of trees. She sweated for them. Bled for them. Damn near died for them — once at the claws of a grizzly, and once from the invisible clutch of cancer. (Working with toxic herbicides and radioactive isotopes in the course of her research likely contributed to her breast cancer, which resulted in a double mastectomy.) But Simard’s sacrifices as a forest ecologist have paid off. Her work with herbicides uncovered the fact that denuding tree farms doesn’t help them grow faster — a finding that overturned the forestry industry’s prevailing logic for half a century. Later, upending basic Darwinian logic, she showed conclusively that different trees — and even different tree species — are involved in a constant exchange of resources and information via underground fungal networks, known technically as mycorrhizae and popularly as the Wood Wide Web.