Deforestation and greenhouse gases

According to the UN, we lose 88,000 sq. km of natural forest globally every year - that's an area of forest the size of London lost every week, or roughly one football pitch every 2 seconds. Only 17% of what’s left has any kind of proper protection.

We need trees for a variety of reasons, not least of which is that they absorb not only the carbon dioxide that we exhale, but also the heat-trapping greenhouse gases that human activities emit. As those gases enter the atmosphere, global warming increases, a trend scientists now prefer to call climate change

Eighty percent of Earth’s land animals and plants live in forests, and deforestation threatens species including the orangutan, Sumatran tiger, and many species of birds.

Farming, grazing of livestock, mining, and drilling combined account for more than half of all deforestation. Forestry practices, wildfires and, in small part, urbanisation account for the rest

When trees are felled, they release into the atmosphere all the carbon they’ve been storing. What the deforesters do with the felled trees—either leaving them to rot on the forest floor or burning them—creates further emissions

An estimated 8% of the earth’s carbon that is stored in living forests worldwide is stored in the forests of the Democratic Republic of Congos. The Congo Basin rainforest plays a critical role in regulating the global climate by absorbing CO2.

The main reason is agriculture. The world’s exploding population has made it profitable for big business to raze forests so it can plant mega crops like soy and oil palm

Adding 2.2 billion acres of tree cover would capture two-thirds of man-made carbon emissions, a new study found.

The UK will have to plant 1.5 billion trees if it is to meet its pledge to reach net zero emissions by 2050 – and this needs to “happen quickly”, government advisers have warned.