World of Change: Amazon Deforestation

The state of Rondônia in western Brazil — once home to 208,000 square

kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres), an area slightly smaller than the
state of Kansas — has become one of the most deforested parts of the
Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s
forests have been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by
1988; and 53,300 by 1998. By 2003, an estimated 67,764 square kilometers
of rainforest—an area larger than the state of West Virginia—had been
cleared.
By the start of this satellite time series from the Moderate Resolution Imaging
Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on NASA’s Terra satellite, the frontier had
reached the remote northwest corner of Rondônia. Intact forest is deep green,
while cleared areas are tan (bare ground) or light green (crops, pasture, or
occasionally, second-growth forest). Over the span of 12 years, roads and
clearings pushed west-northwest from Buritis toward the Jaciparaná River.
The deforested area along the road into Nova Mamoré expanded
north-northeast all the way to the BR-346 highway.
Deforestation follows a fairly predictable pattern in these images. The first
clearings that appear in the forest are in a fishbone pattern, arrayed along the
edges of roads. Over time, the fishbones collapse into a mixture of forest
remnants, cleared areas, and settlements. This pattern follows one of the
most common deforestation trajectories in the Amazon. Legal and illegal
roads penetrate a remote part of the forest, and small farmers migrate to the
area. They claim land along the road and clear some of it for crops. Within a
few years, heavy rains and erosion deplete the soil, and crop yields fall.
Farmers then convert the degraded land to cattle pasture, and clear more
forest for crops. Eventually the small land holders, having cleared much of
their land, sell it or abandon it to large cattle holders, who consolidate the
plots into large areas of pasture.
The estimated change in forested area between 2000 and 2008 is shown in
this map (above) based on vegetation index data from MODIS. Places that
are red lost vegetation, while places that are peach showed little or no
change. The most intensely red areas indicate the biggest vegetation
losses—usually the complete clearing of original rainforest. Less intense reds
indicate less dramatic change, such as the complete clearing of an already
logged forest, or a transition from leafy crops to sparser pasture grasses.
All major tropical forests—including those in the Americas, Africa, Southeast
Asia, and Indonesia—are disappearing, mostly to make way for human food
production, including livestock and crops. Although tropical deforestation
meets some human needs, it also has profound, sometimes devastating,
consequences, including social conflict and human rights abuses, extinction of
plants and animals, and climate change—challenges that affect the whole
world.

Deforestation in
Argentina’s Gran Chaco
The Gran Chaco is not the most well-known forest in South America. It is
second in size and biodiversity to the neighboring Amazon rainforest. Unlike
the moist Amazon, the Gran Chaco is located in a semi-arid climate; its
vegetation is less colorful. But like the Amazon, the Gran Chaco has been
facing rapid deforestation over recent years.
The Gran Chaco spans about 650,000 square kilometers (250,000 square
miles) in Argentina, Paraguay, Bolivia, and Brazil—making it the largest dry
forest in South America. It largely consists of shrubs and hardwood trees that
provide habitat for thousands of plant species and hundreds of animal
species. The native Wichí people have hunted and gathered on this land for
decades.
But observations by Landsat satellites indicate that roughly 20
percent—142,000 square kilometers (55,000 square miles)—of the forest was
converted into farmland or grazing land from 1985-2013. From 2010 to 2018,
more than 29,000 square kilometers (11,000 square miles) of the Gran Chaco
was cleared for farms and ranches, according to the non-profit Guyra
Paraguay. Much of the clearing took place in Argentina.
The images above show deforestation over a span of two decades around the
Salta Province of northern Argentina. The image from December 18, 2000,
shows a mix of cleared land and greener areas. The image from December
24, 2019, shows much of the forest replaced by large fields. The images were
acquired by the Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) on
NASA’s Terra satellite.
Much of the cleared land has been converted to farmland for growing
soybeans and raising livestock. Argentina is the third-largest soybean
producer in the world. Research shows that soybean production was a direct
driver of deforestation in the forest in the 2000s. As soybean producers felt
more pressure to keep up with global demand, they needed to find untapped
land and began clearing forests and arid regions. Advances in technology
made it easier to grow crops on these marginal lands, which were previously
difficult to cultivate.
Controlling deforestation in Gran Chaco has been challenging. In 2007,
Argentina enacted a national “forest law” mandating that local governments
regulate the expansion of large-scale farming and establish practices to
protect native forests. However, research shows that local governments were
unable to enforce the law in certain protected zones, some of which actually
experienced an increase in deforestation after the law was passed.

Sizing Up How
Agriculture Connects to
Deforestation
Every year, scientists at the University of Maryland publish new data about the
state of Earth’s forests based on observations from Landsat satellites. As has
often been the case in recent years, the update for 2020 painted a bleak
picture. In that one year, Earth lost nearly 26 million hectares of tree
cover—an area larger than the United Kingdom.
The raw numbers can tell us how much and where forests were lost, but they
do not explain what was driving those losses. How much deforestation was
due to wildfires? Food production? Forestry management? An ongoing effort
by researchers from The Sustainability Consortium and the World Resources
Institute (WRI) attempts to answer such questions with maps and datasets
that categorize and quantify the major drivers of annual forest losses. In doing
so, the researchers have put a spotlight on the impact that food production
has on forests, particularly in the tropics.
In 2020, for instance, Earth lost about 4.2 million hectares (16,000 square
miles) of humid tropical primary forest—an area about the size of the
Netherlands. Nearly half of that, their analysis shows, was due to food
production, and half of that was due to commodity crops. In recent years,
commodity crop production has pushed rates of forest loss to record levels.
The map above, based on an analysis of Landsat data by The Sustainability
Consortium and WRI, highlights several key drivers of forest loss. Shifting
agriculture (yellow) typically involves the clearing of small plots within forests
in Africa, Central America, and parts of South America. The clearing is done
by subsistence farmers, often families, who raise a mixture of vegetables,
fruits, grains, and small livestock herds for a few years and then let fields go
fallow and move on as soil loses its fertility. The practice is especially common
in Africa, and has become more so since 2000 due to increasing human
populations.
In South America and Southeast Asia, commodity crops (tan on the map)
have become the dominant driver of forest loss. Common commodity crops
include beef, soybeans, palm oil, corn, and cotton. They are typically grown
on an industrial scale and traded internationally. Unlike the temporary forest
clearings associated with small-scale agriculture, commodity-scale production
often involves clear-cutting and results in significant impacts on forests (like
the Indonesian palm oil plantation below).
“In many cases, commodity-driven deforestation is essentially a permanent
change compared to shifting agriculture,” explained Christy Slay, a
conservation ecologist and the senior director of science and research
applications at The Sustainability Consortium. “These areas will likely never
be forests again.”
In contrast, forests cleared for forestry management or by wildfires generally
grow back over time. In the U.S. Southeast, for instance, managers maintain
certain ecosystems and animal habitats by periodically burning and planting
forests to mimic natural cycles of burning and regrowth. Likewise, forests in
the Pacific Northwest and Europe are often managed for timber in ways that
cycle between periods of forest clearing and periods of regrowth.
Note that food production was once a major driver of deforestation in North
America and Europe, but much of the clearing happened a hundred or more
years ago. Since many forests in these areas were already gone by 2000,
their absence does not register as forest loss. Nor does the map capture the
impact of large-scale conversion of natural grasslands to agriculture, a
common practice in both North and South America.
With tropical forest cover dwindling and the effect of climate change becoming
more acute, some companies and consumers are trying to ensure that food
production does not lead to new deforestation. In recent years, hundreds of
companies have committed to eliminating or reducing products in their supply
chains that cause deforestation. But ensuring that is often challenging.
“Global supply chains can be complicated and opaque,” said Slay. “You often
have companies buying commodities off the spot market, such that the source
regions change frequently or even daily. Retailers and food manufacturers
often don't know the source of their ingredients down to the individual farm
and field scale.”
By regularly collecting data on the health of forests, satellites are making it
easier for scientists to untangle which commodities and regions are the
biggest contributors to deforestation. Doug Morton, a forest ecologist at
NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, has witnessed a shift in the dominant
drivers of deforestation.
“Forty years ago, we often saw small-scale deforestation creating roads that
look like fishbone patterns,” said Morton, who monitors agricultural frontiers in
the Amazon. At the time, many people were moving into the Amazon to
escape drought and hunger in eastern Brazil. “By the middle of the Landsat
record, we see large-scale commodity production taking hold. Today’s
deforestation isn’t about individual families. It’s often tractors and bulldozers
clearing large tracts of forest for industrial scale cattle ranching and crops.”
For companies trying to keep their supply chains free of deforestation,
knowing which commodity crops are being grown where is critical. “If we know
where deforestation is common and what crops are involved, we can go to
companies and say: ‘Be careful if you’re working with suppliers that are
sourcing this particular product from this particular part of the world,’ ” said
Slay. “Satellite data of forest change and loss is the first step in the process.”
One recent WRI analysis combined Landsat imagery with economic and
land-use data to parse the impact of seven different commodities on forests
around the world. “One of the big things you notice in the data is the outsized
role of cattle pastures in driving deforestation,” said Mikaela Weisse, one of
the report’s authors. “Cattle pastures caused about five times more
deforestation than any of the other commodities we analyzed.”
The map above shows forests being cleared for cattle all over the world, but
particularly in Brazil, where deforestation has been on the rise. Large tracts of
forest have also been cleared in Paraguay, Bolivia, and Peru according to
WRI data.
In Southeast Asia, where deforestation rates have dropped recently, most
forest losses are associated with palm oil, which is used in many types of
processed foods and various health and beauty products like deodorant,
shampoo, toothpaste, soap, and lipstick. Deforestation for cocoa production
had a sizable impact in certain countries—notably Ghana and Côte
d'Ivoire—but only represented 3 percent of total forests losses. Other
commodities with similarly modest effects on global forests included rubber,
coffee, and wood fiber.
While new tools are making it easier to understand where food production is
intersecting with new deforestation, huge challenges remain. “Deforestation
rates are going up instead of down,” said Elizabeth Goldman of WRI. “There’s
a lot of work left to do.”