By Will Hayes, GCDC Doctoral Candidate, School of Anthropology & Conservation
As our ‘World Leaders’ pledge to end global deforestation by 2030 at COP26, I can’t help but take this news with a pinch of salt. Deforestation, particularly in the tropics, continues to grow at alarming rates, contributing to biodiversity loss, global warming, and detrimental impacts on indigenous people’s livelihoods. The Amazon rainforest biome accounts for a large proportion of global forest, harbouring the highest terrestrial biodiversity in the world and playing a key role in climate change mitigation. However, over the last 50 years, much of the rainforest boundaries in the Amazon have become embedded in human-modified landscapes containing a variety of damaging land-use systems such as agriculture and mining. For example, over the last half-century, the region has experienced rapid land-use change which has resulted in a loss of 20% of Brazil’s forest cover, and this destruction shows no signs of stopping.
(Figure 1: Mines embedded within Guyana’s rainforest (image – authors own))
Despite this, there remain regions within the Amazon that offer hope. Areas with high forest cover and historically low rates of deforestation, such as the Guiana Shield. Comprising most of the northern Amazonia, the Guiana Shield accounts for 26% of this major tropical wilderness area, harbouring some of the highest levels of terrestrial biodiversity in the world. With the vast majority of its land area covered by rainforest, it alone has over 1,500 terrestrial vertebrate species made up of 269 amphibians (54% endemic), 295 reptiles (29% endemic), 282 mammals (11% endemic), and 1,004 birds (7.7% endemic). Given the large-scale deforestation in the southern Amazon Basin, the forests of the Guiana Shield increasingly represent a greater share of closed forest cover and could play a key role in climate change mitigation and biodiversity conservation. Unfortunately, however, in recent decades human activities have been driving deforestation in the region making its ecosystems now among the most under threat in South America, and so identifying scales and patterns of deforestation in the region is key to informing actions to reduce impacts of forest loss.
(Figure 2: Guiana Shield (image – WWF French Guiana))
As part of my Ph.D. with the Global Challenges Doctoral Centre (GCDC), I’m adapting a probabilistic model developed by Isabel Rosa to identify forests at the highest risk of deforestation in Guyana by 2050. Guyana is situated centrally within the Guiana Shield, characterised by much of the region’s typical rich ecosystems and biodiversity. Over 80% of Guyana’s terrestrial area is covered in highly biodiverse rainforests that are also home to over 100 indigenous communities, many of which make their livelihood and subsistence from the forest. It is currently classified as a High Forest Low Deforestation (HFLD) country and in 2009 it committed to a green economy transition based on climate resilience, low carbon emissions, and a low degree of deforestation. However, with mining activities increasing in the region, this status and the country’s biodiversity are under threat due to the destruction of tropical forests, typically rich in gold. By utilising this probabilistic modelling technique we will better understand what drives deforestation in Guyana, predict the location and magnitude of future deforestation, identify biodiversity and communities most vulnerable to deforestation, and help inform the design of policy to conserve its invaluable forest ecosystems.
As the world’s forests continue to fall victim to humanity’s drive for untethered economic growth, the importance of highly forested regions such as Guyana and the Guiana Shield will inevitably rise. With our research nearing its completion, it is my hope our results will soon contribute to increasing protection for part of the planet’s highly irreplaceable rainforests and all the life they harbour.
(Figure 3: Guyana’s Scarlet ibis (image – Meshach Pierre))