TROPICAL FORESTS GLOBALLY are being lost at a rate of 61,000 square miles a year. And despite conservation efforts, the global rate of loss is accelerating. In 2016, it reached a 15-year high, with 114,000 square miles cleared.

Cargill’s recent announcement of policies to achieve zero-deforestation in its supply chains comes at a crucial moment for the Brazilian Cerrado, which is being destroyed at a breakneck rate, primarily for soy and cattle production.

A black beetle the size of a sesame seed is killing South Africa’s trees, and no one knows how to stop it. After arriving from Southeast Asia about four years ago, the polyphagous shot-hole borer has spread a thousand miles across South Africa, from the eastern city of Pietermaritzburg, where it was discovered in 2017, to indigenous forests on the west coast near Cape Town. An unwelcome side effect of globalization, the pest is believed to have arrived along with wood pellets on a ship.

Australia’s Murray Darling basin covers more than a million square kilometers, 14 percent of the country’s landmass. It’s the site of tens of thousands of wetlands, but increasing demand for water has stretched its resources to the limit.

If a tree falls in the forest, will another replace it?

Of the roughly 3 million square kilometers of forest lost worldwide from 2001 to 2015, a new analysis suggests that 27 percent of that loss was permanent — the result of land being converted for industrial agriculture to meet global demand for products such as soy, timber, beef and palm oil.

Tree planting has been widely promoted as a solution to climate change, because plants absorb the climate-warming gases from Earth’s atmosphere as they grow.

Trees’ services to this planet range from carbon storage and soil conservation to water cycle regulation. They support natural and human food systems and provide homes for countless species – including us, through building materials.

It’s tempting to think that our forests would be fine if we could simply stop trees being felled or burnt. But forests – particularly tropical ones – are more than just trees. They’re also the animals that skulk and swoop among them.

A researcher at the INPE Center of Land System Science, Antonio Donato Nobre, describes the state of degradation threatening the future of the Amazon rainforest in an exclusive interview with Mongabay.

This March  the International Day of Forests is putting the spotlight on the great variety of animal, plant and other life supported by the world’s forests with the theme, “Forests and Biodiversity: Too precious to lose.”

The continued use of wood-derived biomass could result in a potential 30% increase in worldwide forest cover — more than a billion hectares (2.5 billion acres) — by the year 2100, according to a new research paper. The researchers say their calculations show that all that’s needed are the right incentives, higher values on products, and stricter forest management.

The problem isn’t just that many forests are being lost. It’s also that many remaining forests are getting younger.

It was late afternoon deep in the dry season in Fatikh, a village in the Sahel region of Senegal.

What could be more 2020 than an ongoing invasion of jumping worms?

The challenges agriculture poses are well known.

For millennia, trees have provided mankind with fuel, food, fibre and medicine from their fruit, flowers, roots, wood, leaves and branches.

Scientists around the world are looking for ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. This gas is a natural component of the atmosphere, released by processes of respiration and decomposition of organic matter.

The mostly deadly air pollution in South Africa seldom makes the press. It causes by far the most death, disease and permanent brain damage, but you almost never read about it in the newspapers or hear about it from green environmental groups

Agriculture is gradually killing forests, and yet up to half of tropical forestland in Africa, Latin America and Asia cleared for agriculture remains idle, according to research published in the journal Science.

Let’s start by getting some grounding on where we are today.