Their impact won’t start for 800 years — AND growth combats deforestation
Bailey 14 (Ronald Bailey, lectured at Harvard University, Rutgers University, McGill University, University of Alaska, Université du Québec, the Cato Institute, the Instituto de Libertad y Desarrollo (Chile), and the American Enterprise Institute, B.A. in philosophy and economics at UVA, author of the books The End of Doom: Environmental Renewal in the Twenty-first Century (July 2015) and Liberation Biology: The Moral and Scientific Case for the Biotech Revolution (Prometheus, 2005), featured in The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2004, editor of several books, including Global Warming and Other Eco-Myths: How the Environmental Movement Uses False Science to Scare Us to Death (Prima Publishing, 2002), Earth Report 2000: Revisiting The True State of The Planet (McGraw Hill, 1999), and The True State of the Planet (The Free Press, 1995), August 1, 2014, “Predictions of a Man-Made Sixth Mass Extinction May Be Exaggerated”, http://reason.com/archives/2014/08/01/predictions-of-a-man-made-sixth-mass-ext)
Since most species live in forests, chiefly tropical forests, we should take a look at global forest cover trends. Happily, the deforestation rate is slowing. The Food and Agriculture Organization's State of the World's Forests 2012 report notes that the global rate of deforestation slowed from 0.2 percent per year between 1990 and 2000 to 0.14 percent between 2005 and 2010. Between 2000 and 2010, a total of 130 million hectares were cut, but 78 million hectares returned to forests. So globally, forests declined on average by 5.2 million hectares per year—at which rate, the report notes, "It will take 775 years to lose all of the world's forests." It adds, "This would seem to provide enough time for actions to slow or stop global deforestation." And indeed, researchers in 2006 found that more and more countries are passing through a "forest transition" in which their forest area starts expanding. Roger Sedjo, a forest ecologist at Resources for the Future, predicts that by 2050 most of the world's industrial wood will be grown on forest plantations covering only 5 to 10 percent of the extent of today's global forests. One dark blot on forest restoration trends is biofuel mandates in rich countries, which have spurred tropical countries to chop down forests to grow palm oil to produce biodiesel. By one estimate, 87 percent of the deforestation in Malaysia and 118 percent in Indonesia occurred as result of expanding palm oil plantations.