Massive fires fuelled by climate change led global forest loss to smash records in 2024, according to a report issued on Wednesday.
Loss of tropical pristine forests alone reached 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres), an 80% spike compared to 2023 and an area roughly the size of Panama, mainly because Brazil, the host of the next global climate summit in November, struggled to contain fires in the Amazon amid the worst drought ever recorded in the rainforest. A myriad of other countries, including Bolivia and Canada, were also ravaged by wildfires.It was the first time the annual report, issued by the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland, showed fires as the leading cause of tropical forest loss, a grim milestone for a naturally humid ecosystem that is not supposed to burn.
“The signals in these data are particularly frightening,” said Matthew Hansen, the co-director of a lab at the University of Maryland that compiled and analysed the data. “The fear is that the climate signal is going to overtake our ability to respond effectively.”
Latin America was hit particularly hard, the report said, with the Amazon biome hitting its highest level of primary forest loss since 2016.
Brazil, which holds the largest share of the world’s tropical forests, lost 2.8 million hectares (6.9 million acres), the most of any country. It was a reversal of the progress made in 2023 when President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva took office promising to protect the world’s largest rainforest.
“This was unprecedented, which means we have to adapt all our policy to a new reality,” said Andre Lima, who oversees deforestation control policies for Brazil’s Ministry of Environment, adding that fire, which was never among the leading causes of forest loss, is now a top priority for the government.
Bolivia overtook the Democratic Republic of Congo as the second country with the most tropical forest loss despite having less than half the amount of forest as the African nation, which also saw a spike in forest loss last year.
