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How rich countries cause deforestation in poor ones

Such losses cannot be offset by planting more trees at home

FORESTS ARE crucial to the functioning of the Earth. They provide homes for plants and animals, absorb rainfall, produce oxygen and suck up carbon dioxide, helping to keep global temperatures in check. Environmentalists are increasingly worried about their loss. Ten thousand years ago, more than half of the world’s habitable land was covered in trees; since then one-third have been cut down to make way for agriculture and an ever-growing number of humans. Efforts to reverse this trend, including tree-planting programmes in America, Europe, China and India, among other places, have helped replenish some of what is left of the world’s forests.

But such gains do not tell the whole story. For all their tree-planting efforts at home, rich countries continue to contribute, through their consumption, to the levelling of vast tracts of forests in poor ones. A study, published on March 29th in Nature Ecology & Evolution, reveals the extent and location of the world’s “deforestation footprint”. Keiichiro Kanemoto and Nguyen Tien Hoang, of the Research Institute for Humanity and Nature in Japan, combined data on global forest loss with that on international trade between 2001 and 2015. They calculated that rich-country demand for goods led overwhelmingly to deforestation outside their own borders, and mostly in tropical countries. In G7 countries, for example, the area covered by forests increased every year between 2001 and 2015. But after adjusting for trade, the authors found that these countries contributed to a net loss of 20,000 square kilometres of forest in the rest of the world in 2015 alone.

Each country has a unique deforestation footprint. Japan’s hankering for cotton and sesame seeds, for example, has led in particular to the destruction of trees in coastal Tanzania; Germany’s appetite for cocoa has contributed to the stripping of forests in Ghana and Ivory Coast; China’s demand for timber and rubber has helped to wipe out forests in Indochina. America, for its part, is responsible for deforestation in Cambodia (timber), Liberia (rubber), Guatemala (fruit and nuts) and Brazil (soya and beef).

The location of such deforestation matters. The Amazon basin, which mostly sits in Brazil, is home to 40% of the world’s tropical forests and as much as 15% of all the biodiversity on Earth. It also stores tens of billions of tonnes of carbon. The destruction of the Amazon rainforest cannot be mitigated by planting trees elsewhere: Mr Kanemoto and Mr Nguyen estimate that the environmental impact of losing three Amazonian trees might be more severe than the loss of 14 trees in a boreal forest in a country like Norway. Younger forests also may have less carbon-sequestering ability than old ones, because they aren’t as tall.

The authors argue that it is not enough for rich countries to stop deforestation at home—they have to make sure their imports are sustainable, too. There is some evidence that this is starting to happen. Joe Biden, America’s president, has signalled that his diplomatic relationship with Jair Bolsonaro, Brazil’s president, will hinge at least in part on whether the latter halts destruction of the Amazon.

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