25/12/2017

2017 Was A Terrible Year Of Climate Disasters -- And Too Many Media Outlets Failed To Tell The Story

Media Matters - Lisa Hymas

Sarah Wasko / Media Matters
From hurricanes to heat waves to wildfires and beyond, 2017 has been a terrifying year of disasters in the U.S. And too many media outlets have missed a key part of the story: These aren't just natural disasters; in many cases, they're climate disasters.

Some wildfire coverage explored the climate angle, but much of it didn't
Even before vicious wildfires tore through Southern California in December, the state had experienced its worst-ever wildfire season, which many scientists said was likely worsened by climate change.
The Los Angeles Times did a good job of explaining the climate-wildfire link in a December 6 editorial titled "While Southern California battles its wildfires, we have to start preparing for our hotter, drier future." Fires have long been a part of California ecosystems, and many factors have played a role in making the Thomas Fire and other December blazes so destructive, the editorial board noted, but underlying all of that is the brutal fact of global warming: "What should make Southern California fearful is that climate change could mean a future of more frequent and more intense wildfires."
Indeed, a number of scientific studies have linked climate change to increased wildfire risk in California. PBS's NewsHour aired a segment on December 13 that featured climate scientists explaining some of these links. "I think the science is pretty solid to indicate that wildfire risk is likely to increase in the future due to climate change," said scientist Radley Horton, a professor at Columbia University’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory. "I think exhibit A has to be the increase in temperature that we have observed. In California, we have seen about a 1.5-degree increase in temperature over the last century."
Unfortunately, many media outlets have not been connecting the dots between climate change and wildfires the way the L.A. Times and PBS did.
When huge fires raged through Montana and the Pacific Northwest this summer, and when fires tore through Northern California wine country in October, the major broadcast TV news programs and Sunday morning talk shows did not air a single segment discussing climate change in the context of those fires, Media Matters found. This despite the fact that scientists have determined that climate change is a major factor in forest fires in the western U.S.

Media coverage of heat waves and hurricanes often fell short
Beyond fires, many mainstream media outlets missed critical opportunities this year to discuss how other kinds of disasters are made worse by climate change.
In June, parts of the southwestern U.S. baked in a record heat wave that brought temperatures up to 119 degrees in Phoenix, so hot that certain types of small planes couldn't get off the ground. The record temperatures coincided with publication of a comprehensive peer-reviewed study that found deadly heat waves are on the rise thanks to climate change. But major television network affiliates in Phoenix and Las Vegas completely failed to discuss how climate change exacerbates heat waves like the one the region was experiencing, according to a Media Matters analysis.
News coverage of the impact of climate change on hurricanes has been sorely lacking this year, too. Even the unprecedented one-two-three punch of hurricanes Harvey, Irma, and Maria wasn't enough to spur some key mainstream outlets to tell an increasingly obvious story.
ABC and NBC both completely failed to bring up climate change during their coverage of Hurricane Harvey, Media Matters found. So did the New York Post, one of the highest-circulation newspapers in the country, according to a report by Public Citizen. The Weather Channel, where many Americans turn when weather disasters loom, also failed to address the climate-hurricane connection during Harvey. Worse still, both Fox News and The Wall Street Journal ran more pieces that disputed a climate-hurricane link than pieces that acknowledged it. These findings by Media Matters and others inspired climate activists to launch a Twitter campaign calling on media to end the #climatesilence.
TV news showed modest improvement at connecting the dots between climate change and hurricanes during Hurricane Irma, but still came up short. And when Maria hit, much of the mainstream media didn't even give adequate coverage to the storm itself or its aftermath, let alone the climate angle, as both Media Matters and MIT Media Lab researchers found.
Climate change cannot be blamed for wholly causing any one individual weather disaster, but it effectively loads the dice in favor of abnormal and extreme weather, as climate scientist James Hansen and his colleagues have explained.
And after a weather event has occurred, scientists can analyze the extent to which climate change was a contributing factor. A new set of papers published this month found that human-caused climate change was a “significant driver” for 21 of 27 extreme weather events in 2016, including the year's record-breaking global heat. Some scientists have already done these kinds of attribution studies for 2017's hurricanes and found that climate change increased rainfall from Hurricane Harvey by between 15 and 38 percent.

As the weather gets worse, we need our journalism to get better
We all lost big in the climate-rigged dice game this year. There were so many record-setting extreme weather incidents and disasters in 2017 that it's hard to remember them all. Consider a few you might have forgotten:
  • The hottest World Series game in history took place in Los Angeles in late October, with temperatures hitting 103 degrees and staying there past 5 p.m.
  • Hurricane Ophelia traveled farther east than any major Atlantic hurricane on record, and so far north that it went off the storm-tracking maps generated by the National Weather Service. It caused severe damage in Ireland and Scotland even after it had been downgraded from hurricane status.
  • An unprecedented and devastating drought pummelled the Northern Plains states for seven months. It laid the groundwork for vicious wildfires.
As USA Today recently put it, "From record flooding to disastrous wildfires, 2017 will go down as one of the USA's most catastrophic years ever for extreme, violent weather that disrupted the lives of millions of Americans."
But that USA Today piece neglected to note the role climate change played in juicing up 2017's count of big disasters.
Some news organizations consistently do a better job of reporting on climate change. The New York Times and The Washington Post have published strong reporting and good editorials and opinion pieces on the impact of climate change on disasters. CNN and MSNBC outperformed other TV news outlets in discussing how hurricanes Harvey and Irma were affected by climate change. In one recent segment, CNN invited climate scientist Michael Mann to explain the connection between climate change and hurricane intensity, offering a great model for other outlets:


But those kinds of segments are all too rare. Many of the most influential mainstream media outlets need to do better at reporting on the connections scientists are finding between climate change and extreme weather. When a disaster hits, that's a prime opportunity to report on climate change, a topic that at other times might not seem newsy. When a long string of unprecedented disasters hit, as happened this year, that's even more of a call for media to tell the story of global warming.
Good journalism is needed not just to help Americans understand the reality of climate change, but to inspire them to fight the problem by pushing for a rapid shift to cleaner energy, transport, and agriculture systems.
Let's hope to see more climate-focused, science-driven journalism in 2018.

 Methodology
To search for broadcast television and Sunday show coverage of the Northwest and Northern California wildfires and climate change, Media Matters searched Nexis using the term (fire! OR wildfire!) w/30 (climate change OR global warming OR changing climate OR climate warm! OR warm! climate OR warm! planet OR warm! globe OR global temperatures OR rising temperatures OR hotter temperatures).

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Meet The Lawyer Trying To Make Big Oil Pay For Climate Change

Vice - Geoff Dembicki* | photos Adrien Leavitt

The attorney who won a $200 billion settlement from tobacco companies in the 90s has set his sights on an even bigger target.

When you want to sue the largest, most powerful companies on the planet, Steve Berman is the guy you call. He forced Jack-in-the-Box to pay $12 million for causing an E. coli outbreak that killed four children. He won a $215 million settlement against Enron for defrauding investors and wiping out employee retirement accounts. He represented auto dealers in a $1.6 billion lawsuit against Volkswagen for cheating on diesel emissions.
Berman is best known, though, for suing big tobacco in the 1990s. At the end of that fight, he helped negotiate a $206 billion settlement from cigarette makers like Philip Morris, R.J. Reynolds, and Brown & Williamson for causing cancer. It remains the largest legal settlement of its kind in history.
But Berman is now working on a lawsuit that could be even bigger: He is suing five of the world’s most powerful oil companies for causing climate change. He represents Oakland and San Francisco in a lawsuit filed last September demanding that Exxon, Shell, Chevron, ConocoPhillips, and BP pay billions for sea walls and other defenses against ocean rise.
Just like with tobacco, the case could hinge on whether these companies lied to the public about the dangers of their business model. Berman has evidence that companies like Exxon knew burning oil causes climate change as early as the 1950s. Internally, oil companies took steps to protect their offshore oil rigs and Arctic pipelines from global warming while publicly they denied the science—the same way cigarette makers did research into cancer while denying their product was harmful. “Defendants stole a page from the Big Tobacco playbook,” the lawsuit alleges.
Legally speaking, that argument might not be such a stretch. “The parallels to tobacco are quite clear,” Carroll Muffett, the president of the Washington, DC–based Center for International Environmental Law, told me.
Still, nobody has won a lawsuit like this and the oil companies I contacted didn’t seem to think Berman’s would be any different. “Should this litigation proceed,” a spokesperson for Chevron wrote in an email, “it will only serve special interests at the expense of broader policy, regulatory, and economic priorities.” Other, less biased observers also have doubts. “I’m not that sure actually,” said Martin Olszynski, a University of Calgary law professor who has researched the parallels between oil and tobacco. “It seems obvious that at some point the defendants will say, ‘But look, there was demand for our product.’”
Berman himself failed to win a similar lawsuit in 2012, when a court dismissed his attempt to hold Exxon and about two dozen other fossil fuel producers responsible for the sea rise swallowing an Alaskan village. But a lot has changed since then. Science linking individual corporations to climate change is more sophisticated. Incriminating oil company documents are surfacing. New court decisions—especially a recent ruling against lead paint companies—are removing legal barriers. Suing big oil could be one way to win real environmental gains in the Trump era. “We have the federal government claiming there’s no climate change, we have the EPA rolling back,” Berman told me in an interview from his office on the 33rd floor of a Seattle high-rise. “[We can] use the law to accomplish what politicians won’t do.”
 The reason not to dismiss Berman is that he has a history of proving doubters wrong. When he entered the legal fight against tobacco companies in the 1990s, mainstream opinion was that he would be unsuccessful. The owners of brands like Marlboro and Camel had crushed hundreds of lawsuits attempting to link cigarettes to cancer and emphysema. “No one had ever won a tobacco case,” Berman said. His own law partner was wary of getting involved. But in late 1998, the industry surrendered and agreed to pay out hundreds of billions of dollars. The People Vs. Big Tobacco, a book about the case, described Berman as one of the “crucial players.”
The stakes are even higher in his big oil lawsuit. Berman is not just trying to get oil companies to pay for seawalls in the Bay Area. In a broader sense he’s attempting to hold them responsible for endangering all human life on earth. “This is different in kind from anything else,” Timothy Crosland, the director of a UK-based climate law group called Plan B, told me. “Once you get started, you get one case that goes through, this is an avalanche. It’s got the potential really to bring down the fossil fuel companies.”
For insight into Berman’s worldview it helps to go back to his 1960s upbringing in Highland Park, a Chicago suburb. “It was a really evolutionary time,” he said. “I grew up with a mother who was one of the first women to burn her bra.” His dad wanted to be a career Army officer but grew disillusioned by the Vietnam War and ended up running an insurance company. “He kind of became liberal himself,” Berman said.
Others he knew evolved from progressive to militant. They set off bombs and ran from the law. “They were elder brothers of some of my close friends and I’ve never seen them again,” Berman said. Though he’s not sure if they officially belonged to the Weather Underground, the left-wing organization that bombed US government buildings and banks in the 1970s and broke Timothy Leary out of jail, “they were in that genre of people out there doing radical stuff.” Berman chose to embrace the law. “The way to make change is to get trained in what the establishment does and make change through the process,” he later told the publication Super Lawyers.
Berman went to law school and moved out to Seattle, where he got hired by a firm that mostly did defense work for companies in industries like insurance. Berman was part of a smaller team at the firm that sued companies instead. In 1993, he met with a parent whose child had lost a kidney after eating at Jack in the Box and getting food poisoning. “I remember sitting in the room thinking, ‘This could have been my kid,’” he said. “I was so choked up I could barely talk.” His superiors at the firm didn’t want to take the case. “So I said, ‘I’m out of here.”
Berman and a colleague Carl Hagens formed their own firm, Hagens Berman. He’d wanted to set out on his own for some time and here was the perfect excuse. Two years later they settled with Jack in the Box for $12 million.
That case was tiny compared to what came next. In 1996, Washington’s attorney general hired Berman’s new firm to represent the state in a wave of public health lawsuits against tobacco companies. Soon Berman represented 13 states. “The quiet youthful [lawyer] worked brutal hours to make up for his firm’s small size, arriving at his office at six AM and staying until nine or ten PM six days a week,” reads the book Civil Warriors: The Legal Siege on the Tobacco Industry. His law partner was skeptical, according to Berman. “He was afraid we would lose the case,” he said. “If we devoted all our time to a losing effort and we didn’t have any income we could go under.”
It was a legitimate concern. By then hundreds of tobacco lawsuits had failed. Cigarette makers argued smoking was a personal choice. They pointed to research—often funded by the tobacco industry —casting doubt on the link between cigarettes and cancer. But several factors aligned to make the industry vulnerable to litigation. A series of whistleblowers revealed that tobacco companies knew smoking is addictive and causes cancer. Secret corporate documents showed companies did market research on how to target children with ads and branding. Mississippi Attorney General Mike Moore filed a lawsuit demanding tobacco companies pay the healthcare costs of smokers who’d become sick. And by 1998, 46 states were demanding the same.
 Berman gave the opening statement at the trial in Washington in front of hundreds of people who had crowded into a Seattle courthouse. “I had a big poster that said, ‘The Industry’s Five Big Lies,’ and I went through each one,” he recalled. By then the industry was ready to surrender. Berman, Moore and others had been holding meetings with its leaders to negotiate the terms. On November, 1998, Big tobacco officially agreed to pay $206 billion to 46 states. It received immunity from lawsuits similar to the ones led by Moore and Berman. Yet it was still a massive victory. “We were pretty damn happy,” he said.
How can you prove that oil dug out of the ground by Exxon is causing a tiny Alaskan village to disappear?
Berman now had a game plan for defeating powerful industries: Accuse them of misleading the public to protect revenues, then find plaintiffs who are suffering the consequences. In the late 2000s, he heard about a coastal village in Alaska called Kivalina that would have to be relocated because of rising oceans. The move could cost up to $400 million, according to his lawsuit, and the Army Corps of Engineers said climate change is to blame. Berman sued Exxon, Chevron, BP, ConocoPhillips, and 20 other fossil fuel producers on behalf of the villagers, arguing these companies spread doubt and confusion about climate change knowing communities such as Kivalina are in danger. Exxon, for instance, had run full-page New York Times ads about “unsettled science.”
“You’re not asking the court to evaluate the reasonableness of the conduct… You’re asking a court to evaluate if somebody conspired to lie,” Berman told The Atlantic at the time.
Berman flew to Kivalina at one point. The village is built on an island off the west coast of Alaska. Its 400 or so indigenous residents had watched helplessly as shoreline disappeared, winter storms got fiercer, and waves lapped closer to the school. There was a pervasive feeling of despair. “The island is sad, sad that it’s going away,” he said. The magnitude of climate change hit him on the flight home. “You could see acres of dying trees from the pine bark beetle,” he said. “That was really striking.” A federal court dismissed the lawsuit, deciding that who’s to blame for climate change is a job best left to entities like Congress or the White House. But the real issue was causation. How can you prove that oil dug out of the ground by Exxon is causing a tiny Alaskan village to disappear?
“There is no realistic possibility of tracing any particular alleged effect of global warming to any particular emissions by any specific person, entity, group at any particular point in time,” wrote US District Judge Saundra Brown Armstrong. It’s a tough obstacle to surmount. “In climate change there’s a lot of diffuse actors,” said the University of Calgary’s Olszynski. “It’s not just the oil companies.”
But there are several reasons Berman’s new lawsuit against big oil could be more successful. Whereas Kivalina was filed in federal court, he wants to represent the cities of San Francisco and Oakland in California state court, which he thinks may be less likely to decide the case raises political questions outside of its jurisdiction. And, he added, “Some people believe that there are more conservative judges on the federal bench.” The defense team for big oil is fighting to get the suit heard federally. The case was “going to be mired down for the next three or four months in a procedural battle,” Berman predicted.
There have also been big leaps in climate science. Researchers like Richard Heede have calculated that close to two-thirds of greenhouse gases emitted over the last 150 years can be traced back to just 90 companies. Exxon, Chevron, BP, Shell and ConocoPhillips are in the top ten. “We have better science,” Berman argued. “We think causation will be easier to prove.”
Financial damages from climate change are also more quantifiable. San Francisco estimates sea-level rise could threaten $49 billion in property. “The major coastal cities in America and abroad have people worried about this,” he said. “That’s a big advancement since the Kivalina case.”
Incriminating oil industry documents, meanwhile, continue to surface. A report released in mid-November by the Center for International Environmental Law has new evidence that big oil was warned about the risks of global temperature rise nearly 50 years ago. “There seems to be no doubt that the potential damage to our environment could be severe,” explains a 1969 study prepared for the American Petroleum Institute by two Stanford scientists. This wasn’t a one-off thing. “From the late 1960s onwards up into the 80s those warnings from their own scientists grew more and more urgent,” Muffett, the November report’s co-author, told me. An internal Exxon memo from 1981 states that carbon emissions could “produce effects which will indeed be catastrophic—at least for a substantial fraction of the earth’s population.” By then the company had calculated that reducing its carbon footprint would hurt revenues. Internally, the industry began to protect itself from climate change. Companies designed taller offshore oilrigs and pipelines able to withstand melting permafrost. “[They] had a responsibility to warn the public,” Muffett said. Instead, Exxon, BP, Chevron and Shell formed a group known as the Global Climate Coalition that argued climate science “is not well understood” into the 90s.
These are clear parallels to the cancer-denying days of big tobacco. But in recent years the comparison has become harder to make. Big oil now publicly admits the existence of climate change. “Reducing greenhouse gas emissions is a global issue that requires global engagement and action,” a Chevron spokesperson wrote to me. Berman must convince a court that earlier industry denial campaigns created lasting damage. Even with better science, questions of responsibility still loom. “In the case of global climate change, a molecule of carbon is literally around the world in seven days,” Scott Segal, an attorney who defends energy companies, told the Washington Post in July. “The requisite causation needed for nuisance suits is missing and unprovable.”
That’s how the law has traditionally viewed things. Yet a recent ruling in California against lead paint companies suggests the law’s view on causation is evolving. “This may not sound like it has anything to do with climate change,” Olszynski told me, “but it does.” For 17 years, three paint companies—ConAgra, NL Industries, and Sherwin-Williams—argued in court that the lead paint they manufactured couldn’t be linked to specific houses where people got sick. But last month the California Court of Appeals ruled that their marketing “implied lead paint was safe,” even though the companies knew it was not. “That’s a really important point,” Olszynski explained. It could mean there’s a stronger case that oil companies are legally responsible for sea-rise damage in San Francisco and Oakland. They marketed and sold a product that they knew is causing climate change.
You could make the same argument about the coal industry. Or carmakers such as General Motors. “If the oil company took the barrel of oil out of the ground but it was consumed in the car, how do you apportion liability?” Olszynski asked. But he thinks that the legal fight against tobacco companies provides a case study for how these types of challenges can be beaten. “Guys like Steve were like visionaries,” he argued. “That’s an important story because it talks about the speed to which the legal system can change.”
As far as Berman is concerned the story isn’t over. On climate change he thinks it’s just getting started. If a judge decides his case can be heard—a big if, considering that no lawsuit against big oil has made it to that stage—then Berman can call on Exxon, BP, Shell, ConocoPhillips and Chevron to make internal reports and research into climate change available. “[I’m] dying to get to those documents,” he said. “I’m convinced they’re going to be smoking hot.”
As our interview came to a close I asked Berman to describe the best-case scenario for all this. “Imagine if I could get ten or 15 cities to all sue and put the same pressure on the oil companies that we did with tobacco companies and create some kind of massive settlement,” he said. He acted as if it was the first time he’d thought of the idea. But I got the feeling it wasn’t.

*Geoff Dembicki is the author of Are We Screwed? How a New Generation is Fighting to Survive Climate Change.

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Failing Our Forests: In Two Years We’ve Lost Enough Trees To Cover Spain

The Guardian - 

Fire. Oil palm. Cattle. Soy. Rubber. Wood. New data from Global Forest Watch shows that forest destruction is on the rise globally, in spite of a slate of pledges and commitments.
Burning forest is seen during “Operation Green Wave” conducted by agents of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, or Ibama, to combat illegal logging in Apui, in the southern region of the state of Amazonas, Brazil, August 4, 2017. Photograph: Bruno Kelly/Reuters
Two years ago the world signed the Paris Agreement to combat climate change. It included specific pledges to “conserve and enhance” the world’s forests in order to combat rising temperatures. But in the last two years – 2015 and 2016 – we’ve lost enough trees to cover 493,716 square kilometres, according to satellite data recently released by Global Forest Watch (GFW). This is nearly equal to the entirety of Spain – or about four Englands.
Currently, deforestation accounts for around 10-15% of annual global carbon emissions. Even as combating deforestation has long been seen as one of the cheapest ways to tackle global warming, GFW’s data shows just how far we have to go.
“Forests are fundamentally hard to protect – they are in remote frontiers or in countries with weak governance,” said Liz Goldman, a Research Associate at GFW.
But she added that the rising forest loss “doesn’t mean deforestation pledges are not having an impact – many of these agreements are still at an early stage.”

2015 – The assault on New Guinea
In 2015, the world lost enough trees to blanket 198,295 square kilometres, an area around the size of Uganda. On the plus side, this was a slight dip from the year before. But it still represented a worldwide trend of rising deforestation since GFW started tracking tree loss in 2001 – even as governments and corporations (increasingly and repeatedly) pledged to do something about it.
Arguably, the most shocking data in 2015 came from the island of New Guinea, which is considered the third largest block of intact rainforest on the planet, after the increasingly fractured Amazon and the Congo. Deforestation on the island jumped an astounding 70% in 2015, threatening the island’s thousands of species found no-where else – think birds of paradise and tree kangaroos – and its local people who have lived closely tied to the forests around them for millennia.
The island of New Guinea is split into two distinct political entities. The western half is a remote – but large and rich in natural resources – region of Indonesia, governed by faraway Jakarta. The eastern half of the island is its own country, Papua New Guinea. Both areas, however, saw significant jumps in forest loss beginning in 2015.
Two pre-adolescent boys who are dressed for yam spirit ritual from Abelam tribe in Papua New Guinea. Taken in Maprik District, East Sepik, Momase Region, Papua New Guinea. Photograph: Donald Macdonald/GuardianWitness
“Visual inspection of the data shows that industrial agriculture and logging are the major players in Papua,” Mikaela Weisse, a Research Analyst with GFW, said. “Data from Greenpeace Indonesia shows that 48 palm oil companies have permits in Indonesian Papua, some as large as 45,000 hectares.”
The satellite imagery shows what many have long warned: that the island of New Guinea has become the newest frontier for forest destruction. Logging and palm oil companies, among others, are infiltrating the island, viewing it as a lucrative place to expand operations in an increasingly resource-scarce planet.
The numbers in 2016 were hardly any better for New Guinea. Tree loss dipped slightly in Papua New Guinea but rose in Indonesian Papua – potentially pointing to a new trend of high deforestation across one of the most intact tropical forests we have left.

2016 – World aflame
As bad as 2015 was for the world’s forests, last year was far, far worse. In 2016, tree loss jumped 51% globally from the year before taking out a total of 297,000 square kilometres.
“Clearly this is a sign that we need to do more,” said Goldman.
Experts at GFW say the jump in 2016 was driven largely by one thing: fire. In temperate forests, fire is often a natural part of the ecosystem’s life cycle and can even bring about renewal to forests. But fire has no place in tropical forests where it is nearly always caused by humans trying to clear land for planting.
Smoke rising from burning areas near agricultural plantations in Rokan Hilir, Riau province, Indonesia, 17 June 2013. Photograph: STRINGER/EPA
 “These large-scale fires [in the tropics]…damage the forests’ natural structure, affect the habitats of plant and wildlife, and release large amounts of carbon dioxide into the air,” said Goldman.
Such fires can even lead to international crises. In 2015, blazes across Indonesia resulted in a toxic haze that at times covered several Southeast Asian neighbours, cost up to $35 billion and, according to one analysis, likely lead to the premature deaths of 100,000 people due to respiratory issues.
Indonesia– which has taken the unenviable spot of the world’s largest forest destroyer from Brazil –has tried for years to combat such fires. In 2011 Indonesia installed a moratorium on new logging or plantation concessions on primary forest and peatlands. But it’s not proven as successful as hoped, according to many experts.
“Our data show that the moratorium has not had much of an impact on forest protection,” said Weisse. “Forest loss within moratorium areas has continued to increase in 2015 in all areas except Sumatra, which [has] little primary forest left.”
She added the moratorium may be ineffectual because it’s essentially toothless. Companies defying the moratorium don’t face “legal consequences,” according to Weisse. Already, some are warning that Indonesia won’t be able to meet its climate pledges which hinge largely on reducing deforestation.
Today, even fires in temperate areas – see California’s epic conflagrations this year – appear to be exacerbated by rising temperatures worldwide.
“There is mounting scientific evidence that climate change is heating up our forests,” Goldman said.
Hotter, drier forests are more prone to fire and harder to put out. It was no coincidence that 2016 was not only a major fire year, but also the warmest year on record. Moreover, the constant cuts we are making into intact forests are leaving them more vulnerable. Decades of research shows that forest fragments are hotter, drier and more prone to fire than intact forests.
“There is increasing evidence that climate change, coupled with land use change and fire could lead to forest dieback in places like the Amazon,” said Goldman.
Already, we have lost around one third of the Amazon Rainforest to deforesters like the cattle and soy industries. Experts increasingly believe that regional rainfall in Brazil is being negatively impacted by carving away at the world’s greatest tropical forest.
After peaking in 2004, deforestation slowed in Brazil. Indeed, Brazil’s successful efforts in stemming deforestation have long been pointed to as one of the major wins in combating climate change and protecting forests. 2016 changed that. A new government in Brazil views the Amazon not as a region worth protecting, but largely as a resource to exploit. Last year saw forest destruction rise in Brazil to the highest level yet measured by GFW, easily eclipsing 2004. Whether this is a one-off incident or a new trend remains to be seen.
Together Brazil and Indonesia accounted for nearly a quarter of all forest loss last year.

Prioritising forests
GFW – which is run by a partnership of University of Maryland, Google and the World Resources Institute – analyses satellite data to track tree loss worldwide at a scale of 30x30 metres. They state that they do not measure true deforestation – the loss of forest to human activities – but tree loss.
“We refer to the data on GFW as tree cover loss because it can’t distinguish plantations from natural forest, or human-caused forest loss from natural loss,” said Weisse.
In other words, to a satellite natural forests and plantations look the same. So, when a plantation is cleared, GFW measures that as tree loss, even though it will shortly be replanted.
However, GFW is working on changing how to tracks tree loss. The group has developed a map of primary forests versus plantations for Indonesia in order to come up with more accurate numbers of forest destruction in the country.
Despite current limitations, the GFW has become instrumental in measuring our impact on the world’s forests, even in near real-time in some places.
The Food and Agriculture Organization also tracks deforestation, claiming in 2015 that deforestation had slowed worldwide. However the FAO, a UN agency, depends on self-reporting from each country, leading to different measurements in different places and a dependence on self-reporting. The FAO also counts monoculture plantations – such as pulp and paper and rubber (though not oil palm) – as forest, despite the fact that ecologists have been arguing for years that monoculture plantations are in no-way true forests.
“They’re about as biologically similar to native forests as my front lawn,” William Laurence, a forest ecologist at James Cook University, said last year in Ensia.
Plantations contain fewer species, retain significantly less carbon, and often result in soil erosion and water pollution from inputs of herbicides and pesticides.
“The truth is that neither GFW nor FAO is perfect or complete, and each has their strengths and shortcomings,” said Weisse. “Rather than see the two systems as contradictory, we believe that we need to rely on both sources to have a complete understanding of the world’s forests.”
Aerial view of deforestated landscape in Madagascar. Home to some of the world’s weirdest and most wonderful species, Madagascar has little of its historic forest left. Photograph: Inaki Relanzon/NPL/Alamy 
The ongoing scale of forest loss means that far more action is required, according to Goldman and Weisse. They say that nations and corporations need to speed up the process of decoupling deforestation from commodity supply chains like beef, palm oil, rubber and wood. At the same time, governments must increase enforcement efforts on-the-ground and make sure companies that defy laws and regulations are adequately punished. Finally, local and indigenous communities need to be given rights to their traditional land. Research has shown that the best forest protectors are indigenous groups – so long as they have secure rights to the forests they depend on.
But first the world really has to make forests a priority, and not just another issue drowned in meetings, proposals and pledges. Governments have to stop paying lip service while turning a blind eye and more forest funding is needed from wealthy nations.
“We want to do more than watch [forests] disappear,” said Weisse. “Our hope is that governments, companies, and civil society organisations can use the information we provide on when and where forests are changing to make better decisions.”

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