Suspect. 5 Deforestation
In the time it takes to say ‘deforestation’, another chunk of forest the size of a football pitch is destroyed.
That’s every two seconds, every single day.
Forests store large amounts of carbon. Trees and other plants absorb carbon dioxide from the atmosphere as they grow. This is converted into carbon and stored in the plant’s branches, leaves, trunks, roots and in the soil.
When forests are cleared or burnt, stored carbon is released into the atmosphere, mainly as carbon dioxide.
The cutting down of trees in tropical areas alone releases more than 5.6 billion tons of planet-warming greenhouse gases every year.
That is more than four times the combined total of aviation and shipping.
Every year, humanity clears over 10 million hectares of forests, an area equivalent to the size of Portugal.
The world has lost 420 million hectares of forests since 1990. That is an area the same size as the European Union.
In 2023, the world lost 3.7 million hectares of tropical forests, equivalent to around ten soccer fields of forest lost every minute.
This forest loss produced roughly 6% of the estimated global CO2 emissions in 2023.
