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Transition

In the name of climate #7: 2020 was not a good year for tropical rainforests

We try, every month, to dispel some widespread beliefs about the environment, climate change and ecological transition. In this edition: despite all our good intentions, we have lost a tropical forest as big as the Netherlands in the past year.

More than 4 million hectares of tropical rainforest, an area the size of the Netherlands, were felled in 2020, a 12% increase over the previous year's rate of deforestation. This is estimated to have released more than 2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere – an emissions tally comparable to 570 million cars, i.e. twice as many as in there are in the United States.

These rainforests are very important for biodiversity and help absorb CO2 from the atmosphere. CO2 is the gas largely responsible for global warming: trees, like all plants, absorb more carbon dioxide than they emit, but this process reverses as soon as they die.

The tropical rainforests in particular store more CO2 than other types of forest on the planet and produce a huge amount of water vapour, which forms clouds and falls as rain – this, of course, benefits crops and biodiversity in general. Also, clouds created with the input of tropical rainforests help reflect the sun's rays back into space, thus reducing global warming and contributing to the planet's climate balance.

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An area of the Amazon Rainforest in Brazil (ArtHouse/Pexels.com)

The Amazon Rainforest is the largest rainforest on Earth and is estimated to store about 100 billion tonnes of carbon – 17% of the total amount stored globally. For comparison purposes, coal-fired power plants emitted a total of 15 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2017. However, the most intense deforestation is happening in the Amazon Rainforest, particularly in Brazil; in 2018 it was the leading country in terms of primary forest area destroyed (followed this year by Congo) and saw a 25% increase in primary forest loss between 2019 and 2020.


The gradual clearing of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest, usually by tree felling or burning, happens mainly along the highways that run through it. Many of these roads are due to be expanded in the coming years. 2020 was supposed to be a good year for the rainforests, since many companies had pledged to halve or eliminate the loss of primary forests caused by their activities and also ensure that none of their suppliers were promoting deforestation; and yet, as reported in the annual Global Forests Report by CDP, a non-profit organisation that monitors companies’ fulfilment of social and environmental commitments, only four out of 687 firms observed have actually kept their promises.