Deforestation kills

Deforestation kills. Not just trees, insects, birds, monkeys and other wildlife who die from chainsaws or fires, but also local human residents, who suffer from a sharp increase in heat exposure when the cooling forest canopy is removed.

Now for the first time, we know just how murderous that can be thanks to a groundbreaking new study that estimates more than half a million people lost their lives in the tropics over the past two decades as a result of heat-related diseases connected to forest clearance.

SUMAÚMA has always highlighted the fact that deforestation is not just a real estate issue of clearing so many hectares of land; it is death. We broke the news that more than two billion trees are estimated to have been destroyed or affected by fire or land clearance in the Amazon during the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro, along with more than a million monkeys, while roughly 80 million birds lost nests or habitats.

Now a team of scientists from Brazil, Ghana and the UK have calculated how many humans are dying in the Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia because deforestation is reducing shade, diminishing rainfall, increasing the risk of fire and raising temperatures.

They found forest clearance is responsible for more than a third of the warming experienced by people living in deforested regions. This local effect is on top of the heating caused by  global climate disruption.

About 345 million people across the tropics suffered from this localised, deforestation-caused warming between 2001 and 2020. For 2.6 million of them, the additional heating added 3C to their heat exposure.

In many cases, this was deadly. The researchers estimated that warming due to deforestation accounted for 28,330 annual deaths over that 20-year period. More than half were in south-east Asia, owing to the larger populations in areas with heat vulnerability. About a third were in tropical Africa, and the remainder in Central and South America.

The toll should alarm local populations in deforested areas, especially those who work outside and are most exposed to the sun. It should prompt the governments of Brazil and other tropical nations to redouble their efforts to halt the destruction of the Amazon and other forests in the Congo and Southeast Asia, not just for global environmental or climate reasons, but because it is essential for the health and safety of their populations in the affected areas.

Even agribusiness groups ought to pay attention. They may make huge profits from converting biodiverse forests into monoculture farmland, but farmers are also feeling the heat. Their crops and livestock are suffering from ever more intense and protracted droughts. Their families feel the stress whenever they venture out from air-conditioned rooms and cars.

And, of course, it needs to be raised at COP30 in Belém to show that protecting forests is not just an issue for global climate groups, but a matter of life-and-death for people on the ground.

But many existential items are not on the agenda of the climate conference, including the phase out of fossil fuels, as Claudia Antunes reports in this issue, along with an update on the misleading suggestion that technology might help the planet return to a more stable state even if heating goes beyond the 1.5C safety rail set by the Paris Climate Agreement.

There is also resistance. A strong civil society backlash against the so-called “devastation bill” passed by Congress has prompted President Lula to veto some of its most contentious moves to weaken environmental licensing in Brazil, though others have slipped through as Malu Delgado reveals in her analysis (Portuguese only).

Life in a threatened forest is precarious. As well as the rising heat and lengthening dry seasons, violence is never far away, as Catarina Barbosa shows in her investigation (Portuguese only) of the murder of Ronilson Santos in Anapu, while Wajã Xipai writes a stunningly beautiful and sad personal reflection of how hard it is for a young indigenous man to move from the forest to the concrete municipality of Altamira, which he describes as a city waging war on its few remaining trees.

If you read anything this week, read how he empathises with – and metamorphosises into – a moth, drawn by artificial light and then crushed underfoot. As well as being exceptionally poignant and well written, it is a reminder, if one were needed, that deforestation brings death.