Amazon fires drive unprecedented global forest loss in 2024
Almost 7 million hectares of tropical pristine forests was lost in 2024, with Brazil unable to contain fires in the Amazon. File photo.
Photo:
AFP / GUSTAVO BASSO
Massive fires fueled by climate change led global forest loss to smash records in 2024, according to a new report.
Loss of tropical pristine forests alone reached 6.7 million hectares, an 80 percent 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 analyzed 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, 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.
Bolivia's forest loss surged by 200 percent in 2024, with a drought, wildfires and a government-incentivized agricultural expansion as the leading causes. Across Latin America, the report noted similar trends in Mexico, Peru, Nicaragua, and Guatemala.
Conflicts in Colombia and the Democratic Republic of Congo also boosted deforestation rates, as armed groups used up natural resources.
Outside the tropics, boreal forests, which evolved with seasonal fires, also posted record-high tree loss in 2024, with Canada and Russia each losing 5.2 million hectares in 2024 as wildfires got out of control.
Southeast Asia bucked the global trend with Malaysia, Laos, and Indonesia all posting double-digit decreases in primary forest loss, as domestic conservation policy, combined with efforts by communities and the private sector, continued to effectively contain fires and agricultural expansion.
Another outlier was the Charagua Iyambae Indigenous territory in southern Bolivia, which was able to keep the country's record fires at bay through land-use policies and early warning systems.
Rod Taylor, the global director for forests at the WRI, said that as leaders descend on the Amazonian city of Belem for the next climate summit, he would like to see countries make progress in introducing better funding mechanisms for conservation.
"At the moment," he said, "there's more money to be paid by chopping forests down than keeping them standing."
- Reuters
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RNZ News
13 hours ago
- RNZ News
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Methane review: An independent review of biogenic methane science and targets has been initiated to provide up-to-date scientific evidence regarding methane's warming impact. It is widely expected the government will drop the methane target post-review. Electrify NZ: This aims to double renewable energy by 2050. This includes streamlining consenting processes through the Fast-track Approvals Bill. Work is underway to develop a regime for offshore renewable energy by mid-2025. Adaptation framework: Work is underway on an adaptation framework that aims to minimize long-predictable funding, improve information flows, and address market failures. Afforestation on Crown land: ERP2 includes exploring private sector partnerships to plant trees on Crown-owned land for afforestation. The policy is still under development. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
NZ Herald
2 days ago
- NZ Herald
AI boom in Australia: Amazon investment sparks debate on artificial intelligence and housing shortage
But what do we actually get for the money? Just data centres. If I was making a list of things Australia should be doing with concrete and air-conditioning, it would not include making data centres. What we need desperately, what we are horribly short of, is homes. House prices are zooming up, and not just from speculation. We've had huge inflation in the cost of building. Building a house from scratch costs around A$500,000, depending on its size and location. Maybe as much as a million bucks. And the inflation data tell us that price is up 39% compared with 2020. Even renovation costs a bomb. Chucking a renovation on a small old home is now an A$500,000+ activity. Jeff Bezos' Amazon wants to build data centres in Australia. Photo / Getty Images Why is building houses expensive? For a lot of reasons. One is the tradie shortage. Prices for getting the plumbing and wiring and framework of a house all put in are up sharply. Concrete slabs cost a fortune now. Australia needs new homes. Photo / Getty Images When it comes to these data centres, Amazon is supplying the capital, the money, which is nice. But money is not something Australia is super short of. We have trillions in the national superannuation fund that's just plonked in the sharemarket. (In fact, we have more super funds than the whole sharemarket is worth, so we now have to invest in other countries' sharemarkets too.) What we are short of is skilled people. Unemployment is at a historically low 4.3% right now. Unemployment among trades workers (people whose last job was in the trades) is about as low as it has ever been. You build a data centre – it doesn't cause the plumber tree to magically make more plumbers. The result is some fella driving his Ford Ranger to the data centre site instead of a site where they are making a new suburb. He spends the day plumbing server air-conditioning systems instead of dunnies. We get fewer workers in the home-building industry and fewer new homes. Large language models In a perfect world, we would be trying to allocate all our spare workers to making homes – and reallocate the workers who aren't spare to that task too. But instead we will be allocating them to meet the needs of large language models. Artificial intelligence (AI) has lots of different tricks but the most popular ones are language models, where you ask it a question and it tells you an answer, like GPT-5, the newest update that came out this week. Large language models are trained on published materials (including my articles on the internet, which I think is quite cool, and my book, which they pirated and I'm cross about). So far, large language models are kind of stupid, giving lots of wrong answers to easy questions, making things up, etc. But anyone making definitive judgments that AI is therefore pointless is engaging in wishful thinking. The pace of change is breakneck. Just because AIs hallucinated and couldn't draw fingers six months ago does not mean they still suck now. The future is yet to be seen. AI could turn out to be useful. (In fact, Waymo uses AI to drive its driverless cars and the early data show they crash way less than people.) But AI is a gamble and the payoff for the gamble will go to Amazon. Whereas making some more homes is a pretty sure bet that would actually help Australians, especially the increasingly large cohort who do not own a home. Less than 50% of 30-34 year olds owned a home at the last Census, down from 68% 40 years earlier. The AI bulge The following chart shows capital expenditure by the IT industry in Australia. It gives us a little glimpse of the foothills of this AI investment boom, which is set to grow even more. Private new capital expenditure and expected expenditure in March 2025. We are already spending three times as much as a few years ago. Not to mention more than in the year-2000 dotcom bubble. This is the other big concern about AI; if the huge investment doesn't pay off, there could be a big market crash. As in 2000, firms will have spent a lot of money on an idea that will pay off eventually. But it won't pay off soon enough to prevent a crisis of confidence, a market downturn, a crash in capital expenditure and an economic slowdown. This is another risk we invite on our shores when we welcome Amazon's capital expenditure. There are a lot of people worrying that AI will bring about a terrifying technological singularity, where it uses its own intelligence to make itself ever smarter and then destroys us. I think there's not nearly enough people worrying that AI will just grind us down by distracting us from building the things that will actually make us happier.
RNZ News
4 days ago
- RNZ News
Three of New Zealand's biggest emitters no longer have to reveal their climate impact
A plume of smoke rises out of an industrial chimney into the sky, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Photo: Supplied/ Unsplash - Mudit Agarwal Three of the country's biggest greenhouse gas emitters no longer have to reveal how much planet-heating gas they produce. For the first time, the Environmental Protection Authority (EPA)'s company-level emissions data doesn't include agriculture, after the government ended compulsory reporting for the farming sector. The change means companies responsible for around half the countries' greenhouse gases no longer have to supply information to the EPA every year giving a rough total of their methane emissions , unless they happen to be captured by other disclosure rules (for example climate disclosure rules covering stockmarket-listed companies). Meat processors Affco and Alliance no longer have to supply emissions data. Nor does Open Country Dairy, the country's second biggest milk exporter after Fonterra. All three were previously among the country's top ten emitters . RNZ asked Affco, Alliance and Open Country Dairy for their totals, but none had responded by deadline. The two biggest greenhouse gas producers in the farming sector - Fonterra and Silver Fern Farms - still disclose their emissions tallies in their own annual reports, as well as listing measures to reduce their impact. "It's critical that everyday people are able to find out who is responsible for New Zealand's climate pollution," said climate advocate Alex Johnston, of the Don't Subsidize Pollution campaign. "To not have big corporate from agriculture, the sector responsible for more than half of the country's emissions, required to report their emissions footprint is not responsible governing. "It's like closing the door on your kid's bedroom when they've left the heater on and then wondering why the power bill is so high." The change came about because the government removed farmers from the Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). Agriculture was previously included in the scheme as a backstop in case voluntary discussions between farmers and government didn't result in an agreement to price methane. The backstop provision was removed and voluntary pricing talks were scrapped and re-started after the last election. Farming companies never had to pay for their methane emissions under the ETS the way petrol importers, coal miners and gas producers pay for their carbon dioxide emissions. However, until this year, they had to submit annual totals giving a rough estimate of their climate impact. ETS emissions reports were the only public information available for comparing individual companies, because some companies choose not to voluntarily disclose emissions. Climate Change Minister Simon Watts told Newsroom last year that officials had prepared an option to keep compulsory reporting while otherwise removing farming form the ETS. The government decided not to take it. He said the government was pursuing farm-level reporting instead. The change means reported emissions in the report have halved compared with last year, down from 65.7 million tonnes to 32.5 million tonnes. The difference is almost entirely because of the removal of the 33 million tonnes previously reported by the agriculture sector. When Fonterra is included, top 10 emitters collectively produce more than half the country's emissions, with Fonterra in the top spot followed by big petrol companies Z Energy, BP and Mobil. Farming companies - or their fossil fuel suppliers - still have to report and pay for any coal, gas or other fossil fuel they use in New Zealand under the ETS, for example coal used to dry milk or process meat. Affco reports its energy related emissions on its website, but not the larger total that comes from methane produced by farming the meat it processes. Alliance's website also discusses progress at reducing coal at its processing plants and said it completed a full lifecycle assessment of all its emissions last year, however doesn't appear to list the total. Open Country's website also discusses successful conversion of coal boilers to clean heat and said it is committed to reducing emissions from agriculture through the He Waka Eke Noa programme. He Waka Eke Noa was the programme scrapped by the coalition government after the election and replaced by direct engagement with farming groups through the government's Pastoral Sector Group. The new group is yet to announce a pricing plan or targets. Sign up for Ngā Pitopito Kōrero , a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.
