Tag Archives: deforestation

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A recent webinar discussed policy, a market intervention and monitoring technology to help stop deforestation

The Liberal International British Group together with the Paddy Ashdown Forum organised a webinar on 27 April 2020 hosted by BrightTALK on how to stop deforestation. 428 people registered for the event from around the world. The aim of the discussion was to learn how to stop deforestation in a socially just manner, given that the largest rainforests exist in parts of the world that are economically lagging developed nations that have already denuded their natural environments of tree cover.

Jon Shepard, a director at Global Development Incubator, explained why we should care about deforestation: forests absorb a third of global carbon dioxide emissions. A quarter of CO2 emissions are absorbed by oceans. The rest goes into the atmosphere, acting as a greenhouse gas, causing global warming and the climate crisis.

The destruction of forests has also been associated with a rise in zoonotic pandemics. Olivero et al (2017) showed in Nature Scientific Reports that destroyed forests with closed canopies in Africa resulted in outbreaks of Ebola, with a lag of two years. The Ebola virus has been associated with increased interaction between bats and humans when bats lose their natural habitats. The COVID-19 virus has also been associated with bats.

Duncan Brack, an advisor to the UK government’s Global Resource Initiative Task Force, explained that agriculture is the main driver of forest loss in the tropics. Consumer-country demand for commodities such as tropical timber, beef, soy, palm oil, rubber, cocoa and coffee, wood pulp all drive deforestation; for most of these, the Asia-Pacific region accounts for the bulk of consumption, but Europe and the US are both important sources of demand.