According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, deforestation alone claims about 10 million hectares of forest annually; but an end of deforestation is possible.
Each year, our planet watches 4.7 million hectares of forests disappearing. The measurement of net forest loss—deforestation plus any gains over a given period—is a distinct concept from deforestation, and over the past decade since 2010, this loss has remained steady.
According to the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization, deforestation alone claims about 10 million hectares of forest annually. A vivid map illustrating deforestation rates worldwide narrates a striking tale of environmental concerns, some of which, like climate change, have a more recent origin, while others such as deforestation have been with us for millennia.
RELEVANT SUSTAINABLE GOALS
Chronicles of a Forest: A 10,000-year Timeline
A deep dive into the past 10,000 years—just after the end of the last ice age—provides a chronicle of how the earth’s surface cover has evolved. Habitable land accounts for 71% of the 14.9 billion hectares of our planet, with the rest being inhospitable zones like ice-covered areas, deserts, salt flats, or dunes.
Over a decade ago, 57% of the world’s habitable land, roughly 6 billion hectares, was covered in forest. Today, this number has shrunk to 4 billion hectares. The loss amounts to one-third of the world’s forests—an area twice the size of the United States.
Human Impact on Deforestation: From Minimal to Magnified
The first 10% of this loss occurred in the initial half of this period, up to 5,000 years ago when the global population was small and growth was slow—fewer than 50 million people. During this time, the need for agricultural land was large per person, but the small global population put little pressure on forests.
Fast forward to 1700, when the global population had ballooned to 603 million. Expanding agricultural lands—not only into forests but also into wild grasslands and shrubbery—was inevitable. Despite this, over half of the world’s habitable land remained forested.
However, it was in the 20th century that global forest loss reached a tipping point. Half of total forest loss occurred from 8,000BC to 1900, and the other half in the last century alone. Two critical points emerge from this trend.
First, deforestation is far from a novel problem: even relatively small populations of the past managed to drive significant forest loss. By 1900, the world housed 1.65 billion people, a fivefold decrease from today’s population, but for the majority of the previous period, humans were deforesting the world with a population in the tens or hundreds of millions.
Second, deforestation experienced a drastic acceleration over the last century. In just over 100 years, the world lost as much forest as it had in the previous 9,000 years—an area equivalent to the United States. The main driver was the continual expansion of land for agriculture, with urban land accounting for just 1% of global habitable land. In essence, it’s not where we live, but what we eat that leaves the most significant mark on our planet.
Reviving Forests: A Strategy Against the Climate Crisis
This projected future could appear bleak for the world’s forests, especially with the United Nations projecting the global population to surge to 10.8 billion by 2100. However, there’s a silver lining.
The world passed the peak of deforestation in the 1980s, and rates have been on the decline ever since. Improvements in crop yields have reduced the per capita demand for agricultural land. Since 1961, the global population increased by 147%—from 3.1 to 7.6 billion—while the amount of land used for agriculture only rose by 7%. The implication is a more than halved agricultural land per person—from 1.45 to 0.63 hectares.
In a future post, we will explore in detail whether the world may have already passed ‘peak agricultural land.’ Technological innovations like lab-grown meat and substitute products offer potential solutions to significantly reduce the land required for raising livestock.
Harnessing these innovations could help halt deforestation, making it plausible to envision a future with more people and more forest. A sustainable planet, capable of accommodating an expanding population while preserving and even increasing our forests, could be within reach.
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