Fifty football pitches worth of forest were apparently lost every minute between 2000 and 2012 according to a recent paper by Matt Hansen et al. And there is little reason to expect this to be different today. This tremendous pace of forest loss is mostly driven by the clearance of land for agriculture, yet comes at a tremendous cost to the other benefits that people obtain from forests, including carbon sequestration, water purification, and biodiversity.
In a new primer for PLoS Biology – think tutorial more than review – we deliver an overview of the global challenge of reconciling forest conservation with land clearance for agriculture. We explain how the economic valuation of ecosystem services can provide a way to choose between allocating land to either conservation or development, highlighting a new paper in PLoS Biology by Roman Carrasco and colleagues. In their paper, Carrasco et al. test how different scenarios of global agricultural production might trade off against the multiple ecosystem services delivered by tropical forests. They find that the value of those services destroyed by deforestation exceeds the economic benefits of agriculture, except in a few regions if greater yields of high-value crops are eventually realised. Together, the analytical framework and results of Carrasco et al. should inform the spatial prioritisation of real-world interventions such as REDD+ and can help deliver better environmental and economic outcomes worldwide. Definitely worth a read!
Ecology in a Gingko-covered building 