Using satellite imagery and data from 100 countries, the Washington-based Center for Global Development has predicted that 289 million hectares (715 million acres) of tropical forests would be axed by 2050 – that’s an area the size of India, or four times the size of the US state of Texas.
Scientists Jonah Busch and Jens Engelmann, project that this tropical deforestation will release 169 GtCO2 into the atmosphere from 2016-2050 — one-sixth of the remaining carbon that can be emitted if the rise in the Earth’s temperature is to be held below 2 °C (the equivalent of running 44,000 coal-fired power plants for a year).
However, they also say much of the losses can be avoided if world leaders put a price on carbon emissions through taxes, payments for emissions reductions, or find a way to limit deforestation.
“We estimate that a universally applied carbon price of $20/tCO2 from 2016-2050 would avoid 41 GtCO2 of emissions from tropical deforestation while a carbon price of $50/tCO2 would avoid 77 GtCO2. These prices correspond to average costs to land users of $9/tCO2 and $21/tCO2 respectively. By comparison if all tropical countries implemented anti-deforestation policies as effective as those in the Brazilian Amazon post-2004 then 60 GtCO2 of emissions would be avoided,” the authors said.
Over the course of a decade, Brazil decreased deforestation in the Amazon rainforest by 80 percent through the use of satellite monitoring and increased law enforcement, even as cattle and soy production rose, the study said.
"Conserving tropical forests is a bargain. Reducing emissions from tropical deforestation costs about a fifth as much as reducing emissions in the European Union. The Paris climate agreement needs to provide funding and other resources to stop tropical deforestation. A climate agreement without robust action on forests will simply not be enough," they concluded.