New global study reveals the ‘staggering’ loss of forests caused by industrial agriculture
http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/09/scientists-reveal-how-much-world-s-forests-being-destroyed-industrial-agriculture
Source: By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: A new analysis of global forest loss—the first to examine not only where forests are disappearing, but also why—reveals just how much industrial agriculture is contributing to the loss. The answer: some 5 million hectares—the area of Costa Rica—every year. And despite years of pledges by companies to help reduce deforestation, the amount of forest cleared to plant oil palm and other booming crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015. ...Philip Curtis...trained a computer program to recognize five causes of forest loss in satellite images: wildfire, logging of tree plantations, large-scale agriculture, small-scale agriculture, and urbanization. To teach the software, Curtis spent weeks staring at thousands of images from Google Earth that showed deforestation with a known cause. “It was some of the most distressing part of the work,” he says, especially when looking at Southeast Asia. “The scale of the loss was staggering.” ...All told, about 27% of the total loss between 2001 and 2015 was due to large-scale farming and ranching, Curtis and his colleagues report today in Science....
Source: By Erik Stokstad, Science Magazine.
Excerpt: A new analysis of global forest loss—the first to examine not only where forests are disappearing, but also why—reveals just how much industrial agriculture is contributing to the loss. The answer: some 5 million hectares—the area of Costa Rica—every year. And despite years of pledges by companies to help reduce deforestation, the amount of forest cleared to plant oil palm and other booming crops remained steady between 2001 and 2015. ...Philip Curtis...trained a computer program to recognize five causes of forest loss in satellite images: wildfire, logging of tree plantations, large-scale agriculture, small-scale agriculture, and urbanization. To teach the software, Curtis spent weeks staring at thousands of images from Google Earth that showed deforestation with a known cause. “It was some of the most distressing part of the work,” he says, especially when looking at Southeast Asia. “The scale of the loss was staggering.” ...All told, about 27% of the total loss between 2001 and 2015 was due to large-scale farming and ranching, Curtis and his colleagues report today in Science....