Losing 3,243 Square Miles of Forest in One Year

A view of stumps in a recently deforested section of natural forest that will become a pulp and paper plantation in Riau province, Sumatra, Indonesia, in July 2014. Indonesia lost nearly twice as much of its natural forests as Brazil in 2012, despite its forests being a quarter of the size of the Amazon rainforest. (Photo by Ulet Ifansasti/Getty Images)

Sumatra and Borneo, two of the biggest among the approximately 17,000 islands that make up the archipelago nation of Indonesia, were once "full of tigers, elephants, rhinos, orangutan and exotic birds and plants," the U.K.-based Guardian newspaper noted in 2013.

That was what life was like there just over a generation ago. Today, a jaw-dropping amount of the tropical rainforests where those animals and plants call home has been cut down, chopped up and burned off the land forever to make way for agribusiness like palm oil and pulp and paper production.

In a recently released study, the scientific journal Nature Climate Change reported that Indonesia is clearing its land of trees and forests faster than anyplace else on Earth. The country lost more than 3,200 square miles of trees in 2012 alone, an area nearly three times the size of Rhode Island.

In Brazil during the same year, an area just over half that size was cut down, even though the Indonesian rainforests are a quarter of the size of the Amazon.

All that forest land coming down spells trouble for the global climate, the World Wildlife Federation notes, as deforestation around the world is responsible for 15 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions.

Trees are carbon sinks; when they're cut down, they can no longer soak up carbon from the air. They also release all the carbon they've stored into the atmosphere as they decay.

Tropical rainforests are believed to hold more than 200 gigatons of carbon, but their trees are the ones being cut down the fastest. Eighty-seven percent of the deforestation that occurs worldwide each year takes place in just 10 countries, with Brazil and Indonesia accounting for more than half of the emissions from the loss of forests, the WWF notes.

Read more on deforestation at the World Wildlife Federation.