Grasslands, wetlands and other nonforest ecosystems are being converted to agricultural land far faster than forests. However, they remain largely overlooked by Europe’s flagship antideforestation law and other environmental policies, according to a new report by the Rainforest Alliance, World Resources Institute and partner organizations.
The report found such ecosystems are being lost to agriculture at roughly four times the rate of forests. Around 190 million hectares (470 million acres) of nonforest natural ecosystems, a combined area almost the size of Mexico, was converted to mostly pastures and farms over the 15 years from 2005 to 2020.
“When protections tighten around forests, agricultural pressure can shift into other natural ecosystems that are also ecologically important but often much less protected,” Siyi Kan, an environmental economics researcher at the University of Oxford, told Mongabay by email. “We need to start paying attention to them now, before it is too late.”
Both forest and nonforest ecosystems are important for biodiversity and carbon sequestration, Kan added. However, most existing policy and sustainability commitments from companies focus exclusively on forests.
Brazil saw the most conversion of nonforest ecosystems to agriculture over the 15 year period of the study, followed by China, Russia and the United States.
The EU’s deforestation-free regulation, or EUDR, is meant to prevent agricultural commodities such as palm oil, cattle, coffee, cocoa, soy, wood and rubber from entering the EU market if they’re linked to recent deforestation. But it uses the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization’s definition for a forest, which states that the trees need to be taller than 5 meters (16 feet). This definition excludes many types of savannas, peatlands and grasslands.
In 2024, several nonprofit organizations and Indigenous leaders called on European politicians to include Brazil’s Cerrado savanna in the EUDR. However, in the latest reviews of the law, European lawmakers did not expand the definition to include ecosystems like the Cerrado. Instead, the law has been postponed two years in a row and it is now set to take effect starting Dec. 31, 2026. And in the meantime, several exceptions and loopholes have been built into the legislation, which conservationists say weaken it.
“Unfortunately, even the forest-focused regulation has faced repeated delays in implementation, so expanding its scope to other ecosystems will likely be politically and practically even more difficult,” Kan said. “Still, that should not be a reason to ignore these ecosystems.”
Banner image: Capybaras (Hydrochoerus hydrochaeris) in the Pantanal wetland in Brazil. Image © Diego Baravelli/Greenpeace.
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