7 critical conclusions from the major U.N. climate land report

Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fired the country's chief of the National Institute of Space Research in early August, after the space agency announced a spike in the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro — who wants to open up more of the jungle for agriculture — called the satellite observations "lies."

The data certainly don't reflect a sustainable use of the densely forested tropical land, much to Bolsonaro's chagrin: Between August 2017 and July 2018, Brazil's space agency documented 2,910 square miles of loss — an area about half the size of Connecticut.

The story of the Amazon — in which one Brazilian state lost an area of rainforest larger than West Virginia by 2003 — is reflected around the globe. A new major U.N. climate report entitled "Climate Change and Land" details that human land use now impacts over 70 percent of the ice-free land on Earth; and since 1961, natural lands equaling around two-thirds the size of Australia have been converted into agriculture. The planet's forests, rangelands, and greater vegetation, however, play a dominant role in stabilizing the Earth's climate, as land systems absorb around a quarter of human-generated carbon emissions — Read more...

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