Tracking Tree Canopy (Overall, We’re Losing)

Last week I wrote about urban trees and how some US cities are recognizing—and helping the public to recognize—their value.

Unfortunately, the global outlook for trees isn’t looking as good. One organization has estimated that since 2000, the world has lost about 6% of its tree cover.

One focus of the organization, Global Forest Watch, is to let people see, through an interactive website, the threats to their local water supplies. Loss of trees is a big threat; they can stabilize soil and reduce erosion, as well as somewhat control the flow of water to mitigate floods and droughts.

The organization points to several parts of the world that have been particularly hard-hit. Sumatra, Indonesia, has lost 22% of the trees in its watershed—trees that once covered an area the size of South Carolina—mainly to agriculture and logging, as global markets expand for paper pulp, timber, and palm oil. As a result, landslides, flooding, and water pollution there have increased.

In the Philippines, which have highly erodible soils, many forest areas have been replaced by agriculture; that, combined with mountainous terrain and intense rainfall, is leading to larger and more frequent landslides.

In Angola, fire has been a common culprit; farmers sometimes deliberately set fires to clear land and help fertilize the soil. NASA satellite data has shown about 130,000 fires occurring in Angola’s coastal region each year.

You can read more statistics here and find GFW’s interactive map, which shows gain or loss of tree cover in a selected area, here. This page provides tree cover statistics by country.