Why do forests disappear?

Analysis of deforestation in the last two decades

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Abstract

Forests make life possible on earth. They provide vital services like CO2 absorption, watershed protection and prevention of soil erosion as well as being habitat for wildlife and guaranteeing livelihood for human. However, the forest covering nowadays is sharply decreasing. How serious is the problem? Which are the main causes of deforestation? Are logging and farming activities connected to the reduction of tree covered areas all around the world? Are there virtuous countries from which we can take inspiration? Are reforestation programs actually working? Looking for an answer to all these question should be a major concern for all the mankind.

What happened to world's forests since 1995?

Forests are known to be decreasing, but is the problem actually so big?

How fast is forest land decreasing globally?

Forest areas in the world has been continuously declining, dropping by more than 0.7 percent since 1995. If this seems a small value just think that it corresponds to a tree loss of about 22 times the surface of the entire Switzerland.

How are forests distributed throughout the world?

Not all the countries share the same extension of forested areas. Biggest forests are located in the Amazon region and eastern Asia: in Suriname, for example, almost 99% of country land is covered by trees. In countries like Russia and Brazil the overall percentage is lower, but their extension is so big that they account for a great part of world forests. High decrease of forested areas can unfortunately be seen in South America, Southeast Asia and Africa.

How about forests in each continent?

From a continent perspective, South America and Africa have been steadily decreasing their forest areas over the years. On the contrary, Asia, Europe and North America effort of increasing tree covered areas can be appreciated. But also inside a continent not all the countries behave in the same way.

Do countires behave differently in their forest policies?

Yes, there are big differences between countries like Brazil and Indonesia, in which forested area kept decreasing, and China, which apparently planted many more trees than the ones that were cut.

Which are the countries that deforested the most? And which the ones reforesting?

Countries reducing forested areas are spread in different continents all around the world. The same is true for reforesting ones: apparently there is no direct link between the geographic position and the environmental policies. The five depicted countries for each of the two groups record similar value of forested area shrinkage or expansion. However, due to the not explicitly listed countries contribution, on the global scale the huge reduction in forest land can be estimated in about a hundred million of hectares.

Do wood production and deforestation always happen together?

Forested land decrease implies wood production, but is the converse true?

Forests are often seen as a resource to be exploited

Wood products are integral part of our daily lives. Demand has never been this big and overall wood production, accounting for different wood dervied products, has increased by more than a billion cubic meters in the past twenty years. This amount matches the total production of USA 2015. What scares the most is the fact that the trend does not seem to stop: growth is steady, and the only significant fact which was able to affect the wood production in the world was the economic crisis in 2007-2009.

Is logging influencing deforestation if seen from a continental perspective?

It does not seem to be the case. The leading continent in generating products from wood is Asia, followed by North America and Europe. What is curious is that these three continents were detected as the ones succesfully limiting deforestation and in the case of Asia and North America this fact goes together with an increase in wood production. On the other hand, there seem to be a correlation between wood production and deforestation in South America and Africa. In these two continents the production has increased by about 30% and forested areas decreased by 7%. Anyway, causal links are impossible to be inferred from such a coarse scale perspective.

7 countries = 50% of world production of wood

The main part of roundwood production all over the world is due to a limited number of countries. The top seven producers are responsible for more than a half of it. In the list of top wood producing countries we can find both deforesting (e.g. Brazil, Indonesia) and reforesting ones. In practice: the amount of forest products appear to be correlated to shrinkage of forest areas in some regions, but this is not the case everywhere in the world. US and India, for example, managed to balance wood production with tree replacement.

Does more food really mean less trees?

Global population is growing, more agricultural land is needed. Are we going to take it from forests?

Is the decrease in forest land connected to agricultural land expansion?

Yes. But not always. In general such a global context is really complicated but what can be said without mistaking is that, at country level, there are positive and negative examples and that a rough aggregated perspective at the level of continents is sufficient to get an idea of the phenomenon at global scale. A twenty year differential value (1995-2015) clearly shows how South America and Africa heavily decreased forest land in favour of wider croplands, while in Europe an North America the opposite happened (even if at smaller scale). Asia is an interesting example showing that agriculture land and forests can grow together.

Brazil: sugar cane and increasing deforestation

With 750 million of tonnes produced in 2015, Brazil is the world biggest producer of sugarcane: India, the second overall producer, harvested only half of this amount in the same year. The fact that herbaceous crops lands are expanding in Brazil is strictly linked to the cultivation of sugarcane and, despite several warnings of the scientific community, brazilian government recently removed the ban on cultivation in Amazon's region , Reuters reports.

Indonesia: palm oil and conservation efforts

Indonesia is the world's largest producer of a well known woody crop: palm fruit. It is claimed that this type of cultivation has several direct and indirect negative effects on the environment. Farmers often light fires in order to create new arable land, with the double drawback of destroing tree-covered areas and generating pollutant emissions. Since 2011 the local government made big efforts to preserve primary forest and peatland from the uncontrolled expansion of agricultural lands linked to palm oil production. Since then, forest destruction has slowed down but does not seem to stop.

Chile: a sustainable alternative?

Chile is an atypical example in the south american context. Given that agricultural production is based on fruits, with particular developement of grapes farming in the last decades, woody crops lands are nowadys expanding. What is interesting is that this fact does not prevent the total amount of forested areas to increase too. This can be due to a particular attention to conservation programs and reforestation efforts , resulting in the substitution of herbaceous lands with trees.

Do agricultural production influence forest policies?

The agricultural style of a country is often linked to the effort of preserving and expanding tree covered areas. Indeed, analysing the 20 countries that had the biggest differential in forest land between 1990 and 2015 (10 deforesting and 10 increasing their forest land) interesting similarities can be observed. China, which has the highest positive impact on reforestation all over the world, shares many agrarian products with european nations (France, Spain, Italy) that are also expanding forested areas; similar agricultural organization and ecological policy can be found in Chile, despite being it geographically closer to Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil and Colombia. Interesting facts are that Zimbabwe has farming style particularly similar to the last three aforementioned countries. African nations in general cultivate different products. In the Middle East area Thailand has, from the farming perspective, a profile much closer to deforesting countries, even if it has a positive forest land differential: there, sugarcane accounts for one third of the total agricultural production, similarly to what happens in South America. Myanmar and Vietnam are very close from the agricultural point of view but far for what concerns foresting policies; Indonesia has a unique farming style.

Is it possible to increase forest land?

And how different countries do that?

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Are all the forests the same?

Although the area of forest in the world shows decreasing trend, there certainly exist nations which have succeeded in expanding foresed areas. In the barchart below the top five most reforesting countries are displayed. The definition of the categories follows FAO's paper, FRA 2015 Terms and Definition. Primary forests are forests that exist in their original state and no human activity has ever had influence on. Planted forests, as name suggests, are trees established by deliberate seeding. Other forests are the ones not classified as either primary of planted. For example, naturally regenerated forests over areas where human activities (logging, agriculture) had taken place in the past are in this category.

USA and Russia reforested differently from India and China

Main factors for forest expansion vary a lot among countries. For USA and Russia, natural regeneration of primary forests contribute to gain additional forested areas. In the United States, ten percent of total forest land is preserved as reserved forest and no timber harvesting is allowed in the land by law as written in the report of USDA, U.S. Forest Resource Facts and Historical Trends. The figures in the report shows that reserved forests had expanded by twenty two million acres (nine million hectares) between 1997 and 2012. The national policy for forest reservation has been producing good result. NASA has been investigating forest cover area in Russia since Soviet Era and it also revealed the forest expansion in the land. Russia suffers from massive wildfire almost every year. Siberian wildfire in 2019 is just one of the most striking examples. The fact that Russia managed to expand its forest land despite the periodical huge losses due to wildfires is a remarkable fact. Looking at China and India, there is no doubt that tree planting is the major cause of reforestation. Surprising thing is the fact that even if both countries are facing significant population growth and coping with needs for additional housings, infrastructure, food, and products, they have achived success in reforestation.

Reforestation in China

China is the biggest contributor for reforestation in the world. Expansion of tree covered areas in China accounts for more than forty percent of total reforested areas in the world between 1995 and 2015. China maintain its primary forests and continuously expands both planted and other forests. Regenerated forests appear to have replaced areas including barren lands such as desert. China gained additional forest areas without loosing areas for agriculture, which are necessary for feeding the nation. The China's continuous effort for reforestation called 'The Three North Shelter Forest Program' began in 1978 and its purpose is to prevent expansion of the Gobi Desert by tree planting. In addition, the nation launched 'Grain for Green program' in 1999. The aim of this program is to mitigate and prevent floodings and soil erosion. Farmers are paid for planting trees on their agricultural land and cultivating some barren lands instead.

Reforestation in India

India also has succeeded in constant expansion of tree covered areas by forest planting without shrinking agricultural areas. This two decades see the continuous growth of planted trees, and one of the main factors for it is 'Compensatory Afforestation', derived from Forest Conservation Act, 1980. Industries are obliged to compensate the forest losses by planting new trees. How forest losses are evaluated is still a controvertial subject, however this program has surely brought good result for reforestation in the nation.

Conclusions

Forests are an incredibly valuable resource for humanity but their care is often not considered as a priority nowadays. Many countries keep diminishing their forest land without caring of the global scale effects this behavior can have. Luckily, encouraged by intervention of the scientific community, many solutions have been proposed: in the last two decades some countries have succesfully applied them, partially compensating the still huge amount of tree cut every year. In general, linking deforestation even to a single cause is a very tough challenge, but clear correlations can be shown in some restricted areas and enviromental circumstances. Wood production and trade can trigger it whenever developing countries are concerned and specific agricultural style are often linked to a higher need of cultivable land. The most useful thing that can be done to learn how to stop deforestation is look at positive examples: some countries, like China and India, managed to obtain good results in reforestation by applying strict regulations and discouraging illegal and dangerous uncontrolled forest destruction.