Deforestation is the world's second largest source of human-induced carbon emissions, which are the main driver of climate change. Currently we are on course to breach the climate danger threshold within 12 years according to the UN.

This is, of course, extremely bad news for the climate—which is bad news for all life on earth.

Humans are eating the world's forests. Not directly, of course—but a spate of new studies shows we might as well be.

The study finds that the average European citizen’s diet has a substantive carbon footprint, a sixth of which comes from deforestation emissions. For some countries (such as Malta, Japan, Luxemburg, and Belgium), carbon emissions due to imports of products linked to deforestation are actually higher than half of their own domestic national agricultural emissions.

Other researchers involved in the study are from the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Centre in Germany, and NTNU, the Norwegian University of Science and Technology.

The paper, whose lead authors are Florence Pendrill and Martin Persson at the Chalmers University of Technology in Sweden, demonstrates that deforestation is driven chiefly by land uses for crops, pastures, and forest plantations to produce specific commodities which are widely consumed around the world by industrial nations.

Focusing on the period between 2010 and 2014, it shows that beef and oilseed products account for over half of emissions from tropical deforestation, with Europe and China among the major importers. And overall, global trade in such products accounts for up to 39 percent of emissions.

The study , published in the journal Global Environmental Change at the end of March, is the first of its kind to demonstrate the extent to which deforestation in the tropics is directly driven by industrial food production.

But a new scientific study by a team of European scientists reveals that the biggest cause of deforestation is industrial farming—and the major culprits include some of the most well-known names in Western agribusiness, such as Cargill and Bunge.

Yet these are usually not accounted for when countries compile figures for national carbon emissions.

By the far the biggest global driver of carbon emissions induced by deforestation is beef production in Brazil, the rest of Latin America, and Africa, accounting for some 34 percent of emissions. The next major driver is from oilseeds products such as vegetable oils, at around 20 percent.

Other commodities which play a lesser but still contributing role include staples such as rice, wheat, cocoa, coffee, tea, and spices.

Trading in extinction

Although the EU is the main focus of this paper, scientists from the Institute of Meteorology and Climate Research, Atmospheric Environmental Research (IMK-IFU), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology, and the School of Geosciences at the University of Edinburgh have warned that the United States is about to make the situation far worse.

A new paper published last month in Nature warns that President Donald Trump's trade war with China is likely to trigger a new phase of accelerated deforestation in Brazil.

Over the last two decades, meteoric growth in the global market for soy has driven massive deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. In response to US tariffs of up to 25 percent on Chinese imports, China retaliated by imposing up to 25 percent tariffs on US goods, including soybeans produced in the US largely for animal feed.

"the dynamics of deforestation are increasingly inseparable from the growing demand for food from consumers in the most developed countries"

As US soybean exports to China have consequently plummeted by half, Chinese demand continues to grow. So instead of importing from the US, China will make up the shortfall by expanding its imports from Brazil—with devastating consequences for the Amazon rainforest.