Rain Forests Disappearing 50% Quicker Than Feared

Destruction of the world’s tropical forests is occurring nearly 50% faster than the best previous scientific estimates showed, with enough trees being lost each year to cover the state of Washington, the World Resources Institute said Thursday.

Between 40 million and 50 million acres are lost annually, according to new satellite measurements of vanishing timberland, with the biggest losses occurring in Brazil, India, Indonesia, Myanmar (formerly Burma) and Costa Rica.

Earlier estimates by the United Nations and other organizations placed annual losses at 28 million acres. But these estimates were based on data gathered before 1980, compared to the latest findings, which are based on 1987 data. The earlier figures also were obtained largely through less accurate ground observations.

Thursday’s published report marked the first comprehensive picture of worldwide deforestation trends based on a compilation of recent studies.

“We were startled, frankly,” institute President James Gustave Speth said in a telephone interview from Washington. “We’re looking at an environmental tragedy unfolding. It’s much worse than had been previously suspected.”

The report, published in collaboration with the United Nations, has disturbing implications both for global warming and the extinction of plant and animal species, he said.

Tropical forests are believed to not only shelter half of the world’s plant and animal species--most of them as yet undiscovered--but serve as a major brake on the buildup of carbon dioxide, a principal contributor to global warming.

Forests, most prominently in the Third World, are cut down at a rapid pace to provide wood for export and fuel, and to clear land for development and agriculture. When forests are cleared and burned, huge amounts of the carbon is returned to the atmosphere in the form of carbon dioxide gas. Tree burning accounts for an estimated 30% of worldwide total carbon dioxide emissions. Burning fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline accounts for most of the rest.

“If you combine increasing deforestation with the increasing use of fossil fuels in the industrial countries . . . it’s easy to understand why the emissions of greenhouse gases have tripled over a 30-year period,” Speth said.

But he also cited reason for optimism, noting that in the last several years some nations, notably Brazil and India, have promised to curb the clearing of forests.

A spokesman for the Environmental Protection Agency in Washington said it was too early to comment on the new estimates but that the institute’s deforestation figures were based on “fairly reputable” studies.

Ellen Tillier, public affairs officer with the World Bank in Washington, agreed. She said the higher deforestation rate was “along the lines” of recent estimates by the bank, which finances international development projects.

Allen L. Hammond, editor of the volume, “World Resources, 1990-91,” called the updated estimate released Thursday conservative. “In countries where we have reliable new data, its far worse than 50%. Fifty percent is a world average,” he said.

Hammond said most of the estimates were based on data collected by U.S. satellites and analyzed by scientists in the countries studied and by outside scientists.

The data covers only half of the world’s nations that have tropical forests. Additional studies are under way, including an update due in 1992 by the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization, whose study released in 1980 was the basis for the lower estimates called into question Thursday.

Hammond said that when that information is made public, it will, “in fact, show even higher rates of deforestation than we’re reporting.”

Brazil, which has the world’s largest remaining tropical forests, also has the largest area of annual deforestation. The new studies indicate that Brazil’s annual losses are between 10 and 20 million acres within the Amazon and 2.5 million acres outside the Amazon.

In 1987, a peak year of deforestation in Brazil, the rate of loss was as much as 80% higher than earlier estimates for that country. During that year, Brazil caused 1.2 million tons of carbon to be released into the atmosphere, virtually the same amount pumped into the air by the much more industrialized United States from the burning of fossil fuels like coal, oil and gasoline.

Since 1987, however, Brazil has taken steps to dramatically reduce the destruction, including stepped-up enforcement and the elimination of tax incentives that led to large-scale land clearing.

Two days ago, President Fernando Collor de Mello announced that Brazil’s armed forces were ready to help stop the burning and deforestation of the Amazon rain forest.

But progress in Brazil is not expected to change the overall picture because deforestation in most other Third World countries appears to be increasing, the institute said.

The World Resources Institute’s report Thursday noted dramatic upswings in other countries’ deforestation rates.

In Myanmar, for example, 1.7 million acres are lost each year, “an astounding” 545% increase over 1980 estimates. The 1980 estimate relied on information collected in the mid-1970’s and a U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization computer model of rural population trends.

The new estimate is based on recent field work, a continuing analysis of aerial photographs and satellite data and extrapolations from the U.N. data.

In India, satellite sensing studies point to a 10-fold increase over previous estimates to 3.7 million acres a year.

The Indonesian deforestation estimate of 2.2 million aces a year is 50% more than the 1980 estimate, and Costa Rica’s figure rose 90% to 300,000 acres lost annually. Only in Thailand are the old and new estimates comparable.

“The 1980s were a decade of devastation for the global environment. In the 1990s things could either get much, much worse or we could begin to start a healing. It all depends on what our governments are willing to do, more than anything else,” Speth said. He called developments in Brazil encouraging.

The report, published in collaboration with the U.N. Environment Program and the U.N. Development Program, also for the first time ranked greenhouse gas emissions from 146 countries.

The United States and Soviet Union ranked No. 1 and No. 2, respectively. Combined, they accounted for nearly 30% of all greenhouse gas emissions worldwide in 1987, followed by Brazil, China, India, Japan, West Germany and Great Britain. If the European Community is considered as a single entity, it would rank second behind the United States instead of the Soviet Union.

Worldwide, the equivalent of 6.5 billion tons of carbon in the form of carbon dioxide, methane and chlorofluorocarbons were added to the atmosphere in 1987, the report said.

LAST STAND IN PALAWAN--Loggers and squatter farmers strip Philippine forests. A5