Wildfires push forest destruction to 20-year high just as EU delays anti-deforestation rules

BRUSSELS — Tropical forest loss rocketed to a 20-year high in 2024 as climate change-fueled wildfires tore through some of the planet’s most important natural carbon sinks.

Close to 7 million hectares of primary tropical forests were destroyed last year, with nearly half of that due to fire, said a report from the World Resources Institute (WRI) and the University of Maryland published Wednesday.

Wildfires also swept through boreal forests — in particular in Russia and Canada — leading to 30 million hectares of trees being lost globally in 2024, and resulting in an estimated 4.1 gigatons of greenhouse gas emissions.

It came as the European Union decided to delay anti-deforestation rules and wind back other environmental protections in a bid to boost economic competitiveness.

“This is a dangerous feedback loop we cannot afford to trigger further,” warned Peter Potapov, research professor at the University of Maryland. “If this trend [of fire-driven forest loss] continues, it could permanently transform critical natural areas and unleash large amounts of carbon — intensifying climate change and fueling even more extreme fires.”

Climate change and El Niño (a cyclical weather phenomenon that exacerbates global warming’s impact) created hotter and drier conditions last year, helping make 2024 the hottest year on record. That elevated the risks of larger and more widespread fires, the researchers noted. Latin America “was particularly hard hit, reversing the progress we saw in Brazil and Colombia in 2023.”

The Congo basin saw notably high primary forest loss, while deforestation decreased in Indonesia and Malaysia last year.

Even with the sharp rise in wildfire damage, agriculture was still the main driver of global deforestation over the last 24 years, according to the report.

The overall picture is hurting forests’ capacity to absorb and store carbon, which helps mitigate climate change. It also means that the world is off track to reach its objective of halting and reversing global deforestation by 2030 — a goal more than 140 countries pledged at the Glasgow COP26 climate summit in 2021.

“This should be a wake-up call,” said Elizabeth Goldman, co-director of the WRI’s Global Forest Watch, noting that to reach this 2030 goal, global deforestation would need to decrease by 20 percent every year until the end of the decade.

EU regulation looming

The data comes as companies are getting ready to implement new EU rules requiring them to police their supply chains and ensure they’re deforestation-free.

Under the EU Deforestation Regulation, companies selling coffee, cocoa, palm oil, soy, rubber, beef and timber on the EU market will have to prove they sourced the commodities from areas that haven’t been cleared to make space for agriculture. The new rules kick in on Dec. 30.

But a group of centrist and right-wing European Parliament members is pushing to delay the rules further and tweak them to reduce red tape for European farmers and land managers.

The legislation risks “placing disproportionate burdens” on small companies “without delivering the intended results” and “imposes technically unrealistic demands for tracing and verifying the origin of commodities,” complained Veronika Vrecionová, a Czech MEP of the right-wing European Conservatives and Reformists and the chair of Parliament’s agriculture committee, in a letter obtained by POLITICO.

The missive, sent May 14 to European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and EU Environment Commissioner Jessika Roswall, also calls for delaying the new rules once again. EU policymakers agreed late last year to postpone the legislation’s implementation by a year, from Dec. 2024 to Dec. 2025.

“We fully support the aim of combating deforestation, but we believe that a framework with such systemic shortcomings may ultimately fail to identify actual illegal activity,” Vrecionová wrote, warning that “it could hinder legitimate EU-based producers and compromise the competitiveness of our agri-food and forestry sectors.”

The letter also shows that right-wing forces are not giving up on their attempt to modify the regulation.

Late last year, the center-right European People’s Party — the largest group in Parliament and von der Leyen’s political family — failed in its push to amend the legislation and label the EU a “no risk” area, shielding small European farmers and foresters from the rules. Vrecionová’s letter reiterated that demand.