Rate of Global Deforestation is decreasing. Or is It?

Apparently the actual rate of deforestation depends on who you ask.

http://ensia.com/features/global-deforestation-is-decreasing-or-is-it/

Last year, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations released its latest Global Forest Resources Assessment. According to the assessment, we have seen a net loss of forests of 129 million hectares since 1990, an area about the size of Peru. But the report, released every five years, also found that the rate of deforestation had slowed recently: forests experienced 56 percent less net loss annually in the past five years than during the 1990s. The Global Forest Resources Assessment found a significant slowdown in deforestation in the tropics, while net forest cover in temperate regions was either stable or rising.

Anssi Pekkarinen, leader of the FAO’s Forest Monitoring and Assessment Team, says the team is “quite confident” that deforestation has slowed in the tropics. Between 1990 and 2000, tropical forests lost more than 9 million hectares (20 million acres) annually, but over the past five years annual losses slightly exceed 6 million hectares (10 million acres), according to the Global Forest Resources Assessment. Critics, however, contend the FAO data are marred by dependence on local governments with varying abilities — and desires — to accurately monitor or report forest cover. Moreover, definitions of forest vary depending on the government and the time period, making comparing forest loss over decades difficult.

Meanwhile, one of the most rigorous studies in recent years found that forest loss actually accelerated by 62 percent in the tropics from 1990 to 2010.

Lead author Do-Hyung Kim, a Ph.D. student at the University of Maryland, College Park, says the study, published in 2015 in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, was meant to provide an “alternative” to FAO data based on “a consistent definition and methods.” To do the analysis, Kim and colleagues analyzed 5,444 Landsat satellite images, comparing past and present forest cover using the same definitions.

Finally, experts say that recognizing the rights of local people and indigenous groups to their traditional forests could be one of the easiest, cheapest and most effective ways to protect standing forests from razing. Many indigenous groups still lack legal tenure to their traditional lands in tropical countries, but where they have secured their rights — for example in parts of Brazil — research often shows that forests are well protected. In some cases indigenous groups were even better at halting deforestation than government sanctioned protected areas. Efforts to achieve indigenous rights to forests are ongoing, but sluggish for many of those groups who are watching their forests — and their way of life — vanish to chainsaws.