![]() ![]() This year will be another El Niño year (albeit weaker than 2015-2016), which generally leads to dry conditions and a prolonged fire season in Indonesia. The last two years were relatively wet in the country, preventing a strong fire season like the one that burned 2.6 million hectares in 2015. Though the decline in primary forest loss over the past two years is promising, the fight against deforestation is far from over. In February, Norway announced it will compensate Indonesia for reducing its deforestation-related emissions as part of a climate and forest partnership the two countries signed in 2010. The country is already seeing financial benefits from this decline. And in areas under Indonesia’s forest moratorium, primary forest loss dropped 45 percent in 2018 compared to 2002-2016. On peatlands deeper than 3 meters, which have been legally protected from development since 2016, forest loss dropped 80 percent from the 2002-2016 average. The country saw an even more dramatic decline in forest loss in protected forests, suggesting that recent government policies are working. The data reveals that despite a growing number of zero-deforestation commitments from governments and companies, primary rainforest loss hit record highs in 20 due to fires and remained above historical levels in 2018. Once these forests are cut down, they may never return to their original state.įor the first time, new data on the location of primary forests can help distinguish loss of these important forests from other tree cover loss (read more about the data here). Primary rainforests provide habitat for animals ranging from orangutans and mountain gorillas to jaguars and tigers. They store more carbon than other forests and are irreplaceable when it comes to sustaining biodiversity. Old growth, or “primary” tropical rainforests, are a crucially important forest ecosystem, containing trees that can be hundreds or even thousands of years old. The figures come from updated data from the University of Maryland, released today on Global Forest Watch. Of greatest concern is the disappearance of 3.6 million hectares of primary rainforest, an area the size of Belgium. The tropics lost 12 million hectares of tree cover in 2018, the fourth-highest annual loss since record-keeping began in 2001. ![]()
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