Deforestation Cuts into Climate Change Goals

Mines, palm oil plantations, large farms and mining projects are contributing to an alarming pace of forest destruction, a new report has found, hampering efforts to curb global warming.

Satellite imagery indicates that more than 30,000 hectares of forest are lost daily, said the report Securing Forests, Securing Rights, launched in Peru on Monday by a coalition of rights groups during international climate change talks.

Forests play a key role in removing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere; chopping them down worsens global warming.

Over the last decade an average total of 13 million hectares of forest have been cleared annually, with tropical forests particularly affected.

"The expansion of industries like mining, palm oil and agribusiness are the hidden drivers of deforestation," Helen Tugendhat, a coordinator with the Forest Peoples Programme, one of the groups who researched the report, told the Thomson Reuters Foundation.

The report aims to show that indigenous communities who live in the world's forests are often the best custodians of the land for maintaining trees and slowing climate change.

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