The clearing of forests for growing rubber “has been substantially underestimated” in figures used to develop policy on deforestation, new research finds.
The study, published in Nature, uses satellite data to produce high-resolution maps of rubber-driven forest loss in south-east Asia since 1993.
It finds that more than 4m hectares of tropical forests have been lost to rubber plantations in south-east Asia over the last three decades – at least two-to-three times more than previously thought. More than 1m ha of plantations have been established in key biodiversity areas.
The greatest forest losses occurred in Indonesia, Thailand and Malaysia, the research says. In Cambodia, more than 40% of rubber plantations were associated with deforestation, of which 19% was in key biodiversity areas.
The study has important implications for both domestic and global policy, one author tells Carbon Brief, with rubber causing “more deforestation than is assumed in data that underpinned policy in both the EU and the G7”.
However, they caution that rubber – a substantial and sustainable source of income for smallholder farmers with significant climate benefits – should not be “demonised” because of deforestation data.
Use, drivers and estimates
Used by the Indigenous peoples of Mesoamerica for generations before it was “discovered” by colonial regimes and introduced to other tropical regions, rubber is one of the most important crops that emerged from the rainforest.
Natural rubber is made by “tapping” a sticky sap called latex by making incisions in the bark of certain types of trees – predominantly the Hevea brasiliensis, a deciduous tree native to the Amazon basin that is now common across the tropics. The latex collected in cups is then processed to make it less brittle and treated with heat for durability.
Today, south-east Asia accounts for 90% of the global rubber production, with the rest coming from South and central America and, more recently, west and central Africa. It is closely tied to tropical deforestation, which is largely driven by consumption in global markets.
Around 85% of all natural rubber is produced by smallholder farmers on plantations that are often less than 5ha in size. This makes them hard to capture in satellite imagery and national crop statistics.
It is also difficult to distinguish rubber trees in satellite images because they appear quite similar to the forests they are grown adjacent to. Heavy cloud cover in rainforest regions further complicates the picture.
The study authors use high-resolution satellite imagery to map smallholder plantations, using composites across multiple years to tackle the challenges of cloud cover. They then zeroed in on a distinctive seasonal signature for rubber, based on when plantations shed and regain their leaves, to distinguish rubber plantations from evergreen and deciduous tropical forests.
According to the study, mature rubber plantations occupied an area of 14.2m ha in south-east Asia in 2021, with 70% of the production located in Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam.
Rubber-related deforestation was most widespread in Indonesia, followed by Thailand and Malaysia. The study also found that 40% of all rubber plantations in Cambodia were associated with deforestation – the highest proportion of any country studied – with 19% of this area located in areas of key biodiversity value.
The chart below shows the cumulative area of rubber-related deforestation in individual countries in south-east Asia over 2001-16. The orange bars represent the amount of deforestation that occurred in key biodiversity areas and the yellow bars show the amount of deforestation elsewhere. The circles represent the percentage of rubber production that was associated with deforestation within this period.
The figures from this study for forest loss in Cambodia are “several hundredfold” higher than previous estimates relied on to inform EU, G7 and UK policy, according to the study.
Prof Antje Ahrends, head of genetics and conservation at the Royal Botanic Garden of Edinburgh and one of the authors of the research, warns that the study’s estimates – while significantly higher than most – are still understated. She tells Carbon Brief:
“You have to set a threshold on the imagery: if you set the threshold too low, then you are at risk of including all sorts of areas that are already heavily degraded, and if you set the threshold too high, then you miss lots of deforestation. So we actually opted for a very conservative threshold.”
Prof Erik Meijaard, an ecologist associated with the University of Kent who was not involved in the study, tells Carbon Brief that the study helps fill a “massive knowledge gap”. He says:
“It’s great that the authors of this paper have mapped rubber, because unless we know where these crops are growing, we have absolutely no idea what their impacts have been on the environment.”
Meijaard, who is the director of scientific consultancy Borneo Futures and currently co-chair of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s Oil Crops Task Force, adds:
“We’ve been trained to think of a particular crop having certain environmental or social characteristics: like palm oil is bad because it drives tropical deforestation, but tropical deforestation is only part of the story.
“In west Africa, where palm oil traditionally comes from, it is produced and consumed locally and is a part of local cuisine and culture, which is a very different context from palm oil in Indonesia and Malaysia produced for global markets.
“It really isn’t about the crop, like rubber in this case, but about the system in which different commodities are produced, traded and consumed and the length of the value chain associated with them.”
Prices and plantations
A number of complex and interlinked factors influence the timing of rubber plantation expansion, from national policies and subsidies to prices for other crops. In some countries, such as Cambodia and Vietnam, expansion is significantly linked to global rubber prices.
The chart below shows the total area of rubber-related deforestation in south-east Asian countries between 1993 and 2016, alongside global rubber prices, indicated by the black line. The colours show the fraction of overall deforestation that occurred in individual countries: Laos (pink), Cambodia (light green), Myanmar (red), China (orange), Malaysia (gold), Vietnam (yellow), Indonesia (light blue) and Thailand (blue).
The researchers point out that following the rubber price crash in 2011, land that was deforested during the early 2000s rubber boom may have been converted to other lucrative land uses. These lands are not included in the study’s estimates.
They warn that although prices are currently low, deforestation for rubber has been volatile since the crash.
Additionally, the study finds that in some countries, palm oil has expanded into areas where rubber was traditionally grown, with new rubber plantations then being established elsewhere, driving further deforestation.
Traceability, penalties and opportunities
Unprocessed rubber has a long shelf life and can be transported and stored for long periods of time, especially when prices are low.
This proves especially tricky to account for in policies that include traceability requirements, such as the EU’s new deforestation regulation. Under these rules, companies have to provide precise geographical information locating the farmland where their products were grown or raised.
Rubber was included in the final list of commodities targeted by the EU legislation, even though the European Commission’s own impact assessment report for the law stated that it “account[ed] for the smallest fraction of embodied deforestation” and its inclusion would have “limited return” in curbing deforestation. (See: Carbon Brief’s detailed explainer on the EU deforestation regulation.)
Ahrends tells Carbon Brief:
“Because rubber is non-perishable, the typical top-down approach of tracing things for rubber won’t work. It stops being traceable because you don’t know how the rubber got to the processing facility.
“I think that challenge is actually better addressed from the bottom up, so that you work with smallholder cooperatives who jointly negotiate a price and can collectively say that the rubber comes from this region, versus vying with millions of smallholders competing for an already very low rubber price.”
She adds that it is “absolutely” critical that the EU deforestation regulators distinguish between farmers renewing existing rubber plantations and new deforestation of natural forest for new plantations.
The intent of the study is “not to demonise, but encourage smallholder production”, while also ensuring rubber does not lead to continued deforestation, Ahrends says. She adds:
“Rubber is a really good income source for smallholders, if it can be managed properly. It can store up to 250 tonnes of carbon per hectare. If you have the choice between a field of pineapple and field of rubber, rubber is also environmentally the better choice: less pesticide, more carbon storage, better longevity, you can intercrop it, form agroforests you could never do with pineapple.
“Natural rubber is also much better than synthetic rubber, which is produced from, essentially, fossil fuels.”
She stresses the importance of educating farmers to minimise deforestation and form cooperatives to use fewer pesticides and not “overtap” trees, so that plantations do not need to be replaced so quickly. Rubber trees typically have an economic lifetime of 20 to 30 years.
Meijaard says it is important to look at how governments decide to allocate land for agricultural production and how to design land use optimally to deliver the highest environmental opportunities and retain natural areas. He tells Carbon Brief:
“I hope that the global discussion around this paper is not going to be ‘my god, we have another devastating crop that’s wiping out Indonesian rainforest’. That’s not particularly useful. The discussion I hope we have and should all be involved in is: how do you produce the commodities that the world needs and requires most optimally, from a nutritional, social and an environmental perspective?”
The post Rubber drives ‘at least twice’ as much deforestation as previously thought appeared first on Carbon Brief.
Rubber drives ‘at least twice’ as much deforestation as previously thought
The launch of the Africa Energy Bank (AEB) has been put back yet again, raising doubts about the institution’s future ability to finance fossil fuel projects – its main objective – as global lenders retreat from such investments over climate concerns, experts told Climate Home News.
The bank, which had been billed to launch in September after a series of delays, is now scheduled to begin operations in November, according to the head of the African Energy Chamber, an advocacy body for the continent’s oil and gas sector.
Even as the world aims to transition away from fossil fuels, many African leaders have made clear they want to continue exploring and extracting the continent’s large oil and gas deposits – estimated at around 125 billion barrels of crude and over 600 trillion cubic feet of gas – to boost economic development.
As a group, Africa sided with a number of powerful oil-and-gas producing nations in blocking progress on negotiations to craft a global roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels at last year’s UN COP30 climate talks, although some countries did individually support the proposal.
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Meanwhile, major projects under development across the continent – including the 1,443-km East African Crude Oil Pipeline (EACOP) and Dangote’s 700,000-barrel-per-day Kenyan refinery – show that African governments see oil and gas as playing a significant role in meeting their energy and economic needs for many years to come.
In 2022, at a gathering of the African Petroleum Producers’ Organization (APPO) in oil-rich Angola, ministers from its member states adopted a resolution to create the Africa Energy Bank to finance projects for the production, use and trade of oil, gas and broader energy sources.
African control over energy resources
An article on the APPO website explains that the bank was conceived as a way to overcome “disenchantment” with fossil fuels among “the international community” which it said had crystallised around the “energy transition” concept.
“If Western countries, after having long taken advantage of the energy sources they now revile to develop, can afford the luxury of abandoning them, this is not the case in Africa,” it adds, noting that many of the continent’s economies are still largely dependent on oil and gas revenues.
A separate web page about the bank, also hosted on APPO’s website, says its objectives include financing the exploration, production and refining of oil and gas, as well as supporting member states in transitioning from fossil fuels to cleaner energy sources “while ensuring energy security”.
Said Addi, a former executive with Shell and energy commodities trading house Gunvor, said the new bank was judged necessary because financing for hydrocarbons from many traditional international lenders has become constrained.
In trying to fill this financing gap, Africa is not simply setting up another fund to support oil and gas, he added. “It is also an attempt to give African countries greater control over how their energy resources and infrastructure are financed,” he explained.
Nigeria to host the AEB
The energy bank – a joint initiative of APPO and the African Export–Import Bank (Afreximbank) – has so far suffered several delays and is almost two years behind schedule. The initial plan was to start operations in January 2025, with Nigeria as the host country, but the bank’s opening was delayed to June of that year to allow Nigeria time to finalise the construction of the bank’s headquarters in Abuja.
After the government announced the completion of the offices in late November 2025, a new launch date was set for January 2026, which was moved back to April, June and then September. Now it has shifted again to November, raising concerns that the institution may be losing momentum.
Former Shell executive Addi said that if the capital is eventually paid in, the bank becomes operational and its first projects are commercially credible, then the delays will be regarded as normal teething troubles in setting up a multilateral institution. But, he added, scepticism will be justified if it continues to stall.
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Baron Lamarré, an oil and gas expert and former Petronas oil trader, said that missing “three deadlines in a row is not normal”, and warned that if the timeline slips again, “the story flips from ‘ambitious institution finding its footing’ to ‘good idea that lost momentum before it found any’.”
The Nigerian government, APPO and Afreximbank did not respond to requests for comment by the time of publication.
The funding challenge
The Africa Energy Bank is targeting base capital of $5 billion, with plans to scale up to $120 billion within five years by mobilising private-sector funds. However, it is expected to start operations with initial seed capital of $500 million.
The funding plan is to have the 18 member countries of the APPO contribute $83 million each to the bank as equity for a combined $1.5 billion. Afreximbank, other non-APPO African countries and investors outside the continent are expected to provide the remaining $3.5 billion.
But even the initial $500 million has not been easy to mobilise. In May, APPO Secretary-General Farid Ghezali called on members to deliver on their pledges towards the startup goal before the end of June. But the delays suggest this may not have been met, with experts saying Africa may be finding it difficult to self-fund its oil and gas projects in the absence of international capital.
Lamarré said every extension of the deadline points to the fact that “raising fossil fuel capital in Africa without the majors and their financing networks is brutally hard”.
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Since 2020, Western lenders, export credit agencies and insurers have been in steady retreat from African hydrocarbons, he said, while oil majors are divesting their African assets, handing over fields to smaller local operators whose credit ratings are not high enough to borrow cheaply.
Even capital from China and the Gulf, which has partially filled the gap, cannot match the volume, tenor or pricing that Western investors once offered, Lamarré argued.
“If mobilising the first $500 million of seed capital [for the AEB] has taken this long, that’s the clearest signal yet of how steep the climb to $120 billion looks,” he said, noting that the continent’s energy financing gap is as large as $30 billion-$45 billion per year.
Africa’s investment landscape, meanwhile, has been shifting. While foreign direct investment dropped from a 2024 peak, inflows remained roughly one-third above the continent’s long-term average in 2025, according to the 2026 World Investment Report from UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD). They are concentrated in a few sectors including critical minerals needed for renewable energy technologies, battery manufacturing and advanced industrial production.
At the same time, data on global energy investment from the International Energy Agency (IEA) shows that fossil fuel investment in Africa has declined over the last decade.
“Trojan horse” for fossil fuels
While the Africa Energy Bank struggles to get off the ground, climate campaigners have criticised its primary aim of financing oil and gas on the continent at a time when the world is starting to move away from high-carbon fuels to cleaner alternatives.
Bhekumuzi Dean Bhebhe, founder of Africa Change Lab, described the bank as a “Trojan horse”, arguing that its focus on fossil fuel financing runs counter to the global energy transition and the African Union’s Agenda 2063 goals of sustainable development and inclusive growth.
The energy bank, he warned, “risks locking Africa into a new cycle of debt, dependency and fossil fuel entrenchment”, adding that its financing blueprint does not pave the way for a climate-resilient future. “In truth, it is to deepen the same extractive, carbon-heavy pathways that the continent should be moving away from,” he added.
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Kenya-based climate and energy expert Joab Okanda said the AEB’s plan to finance oil and gas is “a misplaced priority” and it should instead back clean energy in line with the policies of some of Africa’s major export markets like Europe.
In addition, the new bank could struggle to mobilise enough resources to advance large-scale oil and gas projects, he added, noting that its proposed $5-billion initial capital is equivalent to the cost of the East African Crude Oil Pipeline alone.
The AEB’s aim of backing more fossil fuels should be flipped “to support countries that are oil-dependent to start working on their transition plans”, Okanda said.
The post Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes appeared first on Climate Home News.
Launch of Africa Energy Bank delayed again in blow to oil and gas hopes
A booklet published by the UK’s opposition Conservative party includes a “cost of net-zero” that appears to have been doubled by a spreadsheet error.
The “common sense” policy document argues that “what people ultimately want is a government competent enough to solve the problems for which it takes responsibility”.
In a section that says “sophisticat[ed]…modelling” should not be a substitute for “political judgement”, the “Right Way” document disparages various estimates of the cost of net-zero.
The Conservative document then claims – incorrectly – that the government’s official adviser, the Climate Change Committee (CCC), had put the cost of net-zero at close to £1tn. It says:
“In 2020, the CCC estimated that its route to net-zero would cost £957bn.”
In fact, the CCC’s 2020 estimate was exactly half this amount – £478bn – and last year it published a revised figure of £108bn, largely as a result of the falling cost of electric vehicles (EVs).
Spreadsheet error
The Conservative party’s erroneous claim appears to stem from another report that had accidentally added up numbers twice, using a spreadsheet published by the CCC in 2020.
The 2020 spreadsheet contains a table listing the additional investments that would be needed to build a net-zero economy, from low-carbon electricity generation through to heat pumps and EVs.
These extra capital expenditures, listed as “CAPEX”, add up to a total of £1.38tn over the 30 years of 2020-50. They are set against operational savings, listed as “OPEX”, of £0.90tn.
Added up over 2020-50, the combined CAPEX and OPEX figures come to a total of £478bn.
In addition to the annual sectoral CAPEX and OPEX figures, the CCC’s 2020 spreadsheet also has a line giving combined totals for each year. It appears that someone has added all of these numbers together, resulting in the savings and costs being counted twice.
This double-counted total for the cost of net-zero amounts to £957bn – as shown in the image below – and it appears to be the source of the claim in the Conservative booklet.
At the time of publication in 2020, the CCC said that the £478bn net cost of net-zero amounted to less than 1% of GDP over 30 years – and that the large investment needed would not only result in savings due to lower fossil-fuel imports, but that it would boost GDP overall, by around 2%.
In 2025, the CCC revised its estimates for investment costs and operating savings to £670bn and £562bn respectively, giving a net total of £108bn over 2025-50, or less than 0.2% of GDP.
Earlier this year, the committee said that cutting emissions to net-zero would cost less than a single fossil-fuel price shock and that doing so would have benefits worth £110bn per year.
Paper trail
The erroneous claim in the Conservative document is referenced to the CCC’s 2020 advice on the UK’s sixth “carbon budget”, which, as explained, does not contain the £957bn figure.
The earliest online use of the £957bn figure found by Carbon Brief is a 12 January 2026 article in the Spectator, by retired engineer and self-described “accidental energy analyst” David Turver.
A day later, Turver repeated the mistaken number in a report for the free-market Institute of Economic Affairs. His report cites figure 5.3 of the CCC’s 2020 advice.
However, as set out above, the CCC spreadsheet containing the data for figure 5.3 only adds up to £478bn, half the figure claimed by Turver.
It appears that Turver accidentally added up all of the numbers in the CCC spreadsheet, without noting that it already included a line for the annual total. This results in double-counting the cost.
(Turver’s report also triggered a slew of inaccurate headlines stating that net-zero would cost £7.6tn – or