Rainforests disappearing at an alarming rate: report

Tropical rainforests disappeared at a rate of one football pitch every six seconds last year, researchers said yesterday, urging countries to include forest protection in post-pandemic plans.

The loss in 2019 of 3.8 million hectares (9.3 million acres) of tropical primary forest - which means intact areas of old-growth trees - was the third biggest decline since the turn of the century, according to data from Global Forest Watch (GFW).

"Primary forests are the areas we are the most concerned about - they have the biggest implications for carbon and biodiversity," said Mikaela Weisse, a project manager at the GFW forest monitoring service, run by the World Resources Institute.

"The fact that we are losing them so rapidly is really concerning," she told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

Loss of primary forest, which hit a record high in 2016 and 2017, was 2.8% higher in 2019 than the year before.

Agricultural expansion, wildfires, logging, mining and population growth all contribute to deforestation, according to GFW researchers.

Cutting down forests has major implications for global goals to curb climate change, as trees absorb about a third of the planet-warming greenhouse gas emissions produced worldwide.

Forests also provide food and livelihoods for people who live in or near them, are an essential habitat for wildlife, and aid tropical rainfall.

The top three countries for primary forest loss last year - Brazil, Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Indonesia - have remained largely the same this century, GFW researchers said.

Brazil accounted for more than a third of all primary forest loss in 2019 at 1.36 million hectares. Neighbouring Bolivia, however, experienced record-breaking primary forest loss at 290,000 hectares, due to fires in both forests and surrounding woodlands, GFW said.

And Australia experienced a 560% jump in tree cover loss from 2018, driven by unprecedented bushfires, making it easily the country's worst year on record.