One football pitch of forest lost every second in 2017, data reveals

Global deforestation is on an upward trend, jeopardising efforts to tackle climate change and the massive decline in wildlife

 Damian Carrington, Niko Kommenda, Pablo Gutiérrez and Cath Levett

The world lost more than one football pitch of forest every second in 2017, according to new data from a global satellite survey, adding up to an area equivalent to the whole of Italy over the year.

The scale of tree destruction, much of it done illegally, poses a grave threat to tackling both climate change and the massive global decline in wildlife. The loss in 2017 recorded by Global Forest Watch was 29.4m hectares, the second highest recorded since the monitoring began in 2001…