Rainforest Destruction Getting Worse Due to Changing Environment

A quarter-century's worth of NASA satellite images show that rainforests are destroyed at a higher rate than previously thought. 

Researchers with the University of Maryland analyzed over 5,000 images from NASA's Landsat program dating back to 1990 to gauge the true scale of global deforestation. 

From 1990 to 2010, the rate of deforestation rose by 62 percent from 15,000 square miles per year to 25,000 square miles per year.

Previously the United Nations reported that deforestation had slowed down by as much as 25 percent since 1990. The U.N. study, however, was based on ground-level surveys and lacked the breadth of the new findings. 

The current rate of deforestation of 25,000 square miles per year is the equivalent of cutting down rainforests the size of West Virginia annually.

Geographer and lead author Do-Hyung Kim said the analysis spanned 34 forested countries that make up 80 percent of the world's forested tropical lands. 

“Several satellite-based local and regional studies have been made for changing rates of deforestation [during] the 1990s and 2000s, but our study is the first pan-tropical scale analysis,” Kim said in a release. 

The immediate effect of rainforest destruction on local habitats is clear, but a less obvious issue is the impact on climate change.

NASA points out that deforestation disrupts global rainfall patterns and increases carbon emissions.