Deforestation is killing people by raising local temperatures

For decades, the case for saving tropical forests has been cast in terms of carbon. Trees sequester vast quantities of it; razing them pumps more into the air. But new research reminds us that the destruction of rainforests has consequences that arrive long before the carbon accounting is tallied: It makes people hotter, sometimes lethally so. A study published in Nature Climate Change estimates that deforestation across the tropics exposes more than 300 million people to higher local temperatures and is linked to 28,000 heat-related deaths each year. Using satellite data between 2001 and 2020, the researchers mapped forest loss across Latin America, Africa and Southeast Asia and compared this with land-surface warming and mortality records. In places where trees were felled, more than a t