Winds of change

Patrick Greenfield
Journalist for The Guardian (United Kingdom)

In 2015, the United States National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) published a time-lapse of the Earth “breathing”. From April to September, boreal forests in Siberia, Scandinavia and North America burst into life, turning much of the northern hemisphere green, only to fall back with the arrival of winter. In the southern hemisphere, the process happens in reverse, the graphic showed, the green waxing and waning on the map with the movements of the sun. The world’s three largest rainforests in the Amazon, the Congo Basin and Indonesia are deep-green and ever-present around the equator.

Along with oceans, forests are the lungs of the Earth. There are dozens of competing definitions for where a forest starts and stops. In general, while trees are the dominant life form, forests are an indivisible mass of fungi, insects, bacteria, birds, bats, and amphibians that rely on each other to survive. They house three quarters of terrestrial biodiversity, including some of the planet’s strangest creatures like sloths, killer fungi that turn ants into zombies, and the nocturnal aye-aye lemurs native to Madagascar. 

For humans, around 1.6 billion of us live within five kilometres of a forest. They feed us, provide shelter and regulate the climate. And yet, they are vanishing, often cleared for timber, agriculture and mining.

The world has lost a third of its tree cover over the last 10,000 years as human populations have grown, but most of that destruction has taken place in the last century. Yet, we will not limit global heating or slow biodiversity loss if we fail to protect forests.

For the scientists that study them, forests remain places of mystery that continue to surprise, and there is much still to be discovered and understood. A growing body of research indicates that trees in forest ecosystems share food, water and even signal warnings to each other through an underground network of fungi – dubbed the “wood wide web”.

They can generate their own rainfall and include enormous creatures like the General Sherman giant sequoia in California.

In 2015, a study by ecologist Thomas Crowther that used new counting methods to map the world’s forests found that there were around three billion trees on Earth, seven times the figure previously thought. Now a professor at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zürich, his lab studies the impact of forests and global ecosystems at scale to help address climate change and biodiversity loss.

“Getting a handle on the scale of these forest ecosystems helps us to put them in context. With this information, we can identify the pressures that are damaging them around the world. We could see that we’ve almost halved the global forest system and the vast majority of the remaining ecosystems are heavily degraded,” he said.

While estimates of the loss vary, the world’s forests are being cleared at a relentless pace. Between a third and a half of the world’s trees are at risk of extinction, according to the most recent report by the British organization Botanic Gardens Conservation International. Thousands of plant and animal species that rely on them could also disappear, many of which are likely unique species or still unknown to science.

The consequences of destroying forests can be disastrous for humans: the spread of deadly diseases like Ebola are linked to clearing rainforests, while the breakdown of healthy ecosystems upon which half of the global GDP relies is a growing risk to global economic security, warns the World Economic Forum.

Conservationists are concerned about the spread of monoculture plantations which have one species of tree and are far less rich in life than natural forests, such as the vast palm oil plantations of Borneo (Indonesia) that have eradicated orangutan habitat.

“They say, ‘you don’t know what you’ve got until it’s gone’, but if we remain on track to lose one of four trees in the rainforest by 2050, we might never sufficiently understand what was even lost,” says Victorine Che Thoener from Cameroon, a senior advisor for Greenpeace International.

During the UN Climate Change Conference of the Parties (COP26) in Glasgow in 2021, many world leaders vowed to halt and reverse deforestation by the end of this decade in a promise that covered more than 90 per cent of the world’s forests. But that promise will be hard to deliver: at least US$130 billion (around €118 billion) a year is needed to protect the most at-risk areas of tropical forest by 2030, more than 50 times the current rate of funding.

All hope is not lost, however. Some countries like Gabon and Guyana have found ways to keep hold of their trees, with both losing only around one per cent of their forest cover in the last 20 years.

Another encouraging example comes from Costa Rica, the only tropical country that has successfully halted and reversed deforestation. In the 1970s and 1980s, the tiny central American state had one of the worst forest loss rates on the planet. Within just a few years, its forest cover decreased from three quarters to one third of the territory. But a revolutionary policy in 1996 that paid citizens to keep forests standing had a dramatic impact, and Costa Rica is on track to have 60 per cent of forest cover once again.

Despite being hailed by many as a possible solution to climate change, the carbon credit trading system has not proven to be very effective in reducing greenhouse gases.

Enthusiastic support for tree planting from major companies and governments has been controversial and produced mixed results: simply planting a few trees can never replicate the diversity of life in a natural forest, and few schemes monitor how many saplings survive. Giving space to forests to grow and regenerate naturally may be the best way, but it is a slow process.

A recent investigation by The Guardian, Die Zeit and SourceMaterial found that this financing mechanism, which aims to provide private funds to protect primary forests, has reduced deforestation only in a very small number of cases. Ninety-four per cent of the credits would have had no benefit to the climate.

Many forest experts say nothing short of a total mindshift in how we treat forests is required by following the example of indigenous communities around the world; just 5 per cent of the human population, their lands nurture 80 per cent of the world’s biodiversity.

Kawsak Sacha, the Living Forest proposal from the Kichwa people of Sarayaku in the Ecuadorian Amazon, puts forward an alternative vision for humanity living alongside nature and ensuring the survival of forests for future generations. It involves putting the forest at the heart of economic and social systems, creating areas that are free from extraction, and ensuring rights for humans and nature.

As environmental activist Nina Gualinga from Sarayaku put it in an interview: “[In the Living Forest proposal], everything is recognized as a living being, beyond what our eyes can see in the Amazon rainforest and everywhere else. Perhaps it sounds complex and far away for many, but I think it’s really necessary right now.”