\t\t\t\t\t\t22\/07\/2026<\/span> More analysis is needed to ensure that tropical forest degeneration and regeneration\u00a0are consistently reported in carbon cycle models and in national reporting, according to a study funded in part by ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Biomass project.<\/p>\n The study analysed how tropical forests store carbon under varying conditions and then release it back into the atmosphere. The scenarios studied range from complete forest destruction through deforestation, which is relatively well understood, to forest degradation, whereby the forest\u2019s condition worsens over time due to damage and organic decomposition, for example through wildfires or selective logging, which is often inconsistently reported in models or omitted altogether.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n The paper, published in Science Advances<\/i>, reviewed evidence from 146 peer-reviewed studies, conducted from 1988 to January 2026. It delivers the most comprehensive meta-analysis yet of how disturbances such as fires, logging and fragmentation drive carbon loss in tropical forests and how degraded forests recover afterwards.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n It focused on a specific subcategory of tropical forest, which receive high annual rainfall but also have a pronounced dry season. These tropical moist forests are usually near the equator and hold roughly 70% of all carbon stored in the world’s living vegetation.<\/p>\n Historically, the carbon lost by tropical moist forests when they are partially damaged by selective logging or wildfire, as opposed to being completely cleared, is difficult to measure.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n \t\t\t\t<\/p>\n <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n The study found that forest fires emit almost 50% more carbon relative to undisturbed forest, while selective logging is responsible for 34% more carbon being released into the atmosphere compared to undisturbed forest. Tree loss at a forest\u2019s edge, due to damage from wind and drier air, also caused 31% more carbon loss. An example of above-ground biomass (ABG) losses and gains, between 2005 and 2024, in the Brazilian Amazon, is shown in the slider above.<\/p>\n \u201cOur synthesis brings together field data, which has been accumulating since the 1990s, and remote sensing estimates of carbon losses and gains that have only recently become available. The new study highlights the need for a more comprehensive approach to accounting for degradation and regrowth processes in carbon reporting and modelling,\u201d said Viola Heinrich, lead author and researcher at the Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences, Potsdam, Germany.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The study also found that partially damaged or disturbed forests retain more carbon than forests that regrow from completely cleared areas. After 20 years of regrowth, the partially damaged forests held on average 75% of the carbon held by undisturbed forest, while forests that regrew \u2018from scratch\u2019 from completely cleared areas held about 38% compared to undisturbed forest. The difference is attributed to the organic material that survives partial damage, such as seeds, soil and tree material.<\/p>\n Furthermore, the study found that if a degraded forest is situated next to a healthy forest, seeds can disperse more easily, making recovery more likely.<\/p>\n The distinction between recovery after degradation and regrowth after deforestation has direct implications for how countries report their forest carbon budgets under the Paris Agreement’s Global Stocktake.<\/p>\n \u201cIt is essential to account for degradation and recovery separately using the correct emission and removal factors, if national greenhouse gas inventories are to accurately reflect the situation in tropical forests,\u201d said Cl\u00e9ment Albergel, Head of the Actionable Climate Information section at the European Space Agency. \u201cThis kind of synthesis is exactly the evidence base that countries need to improve their reporting under the Paris Agreement.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The meta-analysis draws on a rapidly expanding body of satellite-based evidence. Advances in Earth observation since around 2015 have made it increasingly possible to distinguish carbon losses from degradation versus deforestation, and to track recovery over time.<\/p>\n ESA’s Climate Change Initiative Biomass project \u2013 a project that is separate to the Biomass Earth Explorer mission launched in 2025 \u2013 has contributed to this effort by generating openly available global maps of above-ground biomass at 100m resolution, drawing on the Copernicus Sentinel-1 mission, JAXA’s ALOS-2 PALSAR-2, and NASA’s GEDI lidar data.<\/p>\n The Carbon Amazon Rainforest Activity (CARBONARA), another ESA Climate Change Initiative project, is also contributing to advances in rainforest monitoring. The combination of dedicated ground-based, airborne and satellite observations is helping address uncertainties in carbon cycling across healthy, degraded and cleared tropical forests.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n The meta-analysis database compiled by Heinrich et al. is designed to be used directly. Countries reporting their forest carbon budgets to the United Nations often face a practical barrier: uncertainty about which numbers to use. The paper addresses this issue by presenting a comparable framework and showing how the existing data can be applied. The work also arrives as the world is halfway through the UN Decade on Ecosystem Restoration \u2013 a period during which progress towards halting degradation in tropical moist forests was off-track by 20% in 2023, according to the Forest Declaration Assessment.<\/p>\n The study was led by Helmholtz Centre for Geosciences and the University of Cambridge and emerged from the Quantifying Regrowth and Recovery from Deforestation and Degradation workshop held in March 2024 \u2013 funded in part by ESA, the World Resources Institute, and the Global Forest Observation Initiative R&D programme.<\/p>\n<\/p><\/div>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t1<\/span> likes<\/small><\/span><\/p>\n<\/header>\nPartial damage or clearance: how forests react<\/h2>\n
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\n\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t<\/figcaption><\/figure>\nSatellites are closing the measurement gap<\/h2>\n
Turning the evidence into policy <\/h2>\n