; sense of Congress (a) Findings Congress makes the following findings: (1) According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 31 percent of land on earth is covered in forests, but that area is rapidly decreasing. An estimated 1,600,000 square miles of forest has been converted to other land uses since 1990, with 42,500 square miles converted annually since 2010. Since the early 2000s, 2/3 of global forest cover loss has occurred in the tropics and subtropics. (2) At least 69 percent of tropical forest conversion into commercial agriculture uses between 2013 and 2019 was carried out in contravention of the laws of the country in which the conversion occurred. (3) Such illegal forest conversion results in the emission of more than 2.7 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent per year, more than the entire annual fossil fuel emissions of India in 2018. (4) The global increase of average temperatures can be mitigated by natural climate solutions like rapid and significant reductions in deforestation globally. Cost-effective greenhouse gas emission mitigation from forests and land use can provide roughly 1/3 of the mitigation required by 2030 to hold the increase in the global average temperature below 2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. (5) Forests contain most of the world’s terrestrial biodiversity, providing habitats for 80 percent of amphibian species, 75 percent of bird species, 68 percent of mammal species, and 60,000 different species of trees. (6) Forests are also an important source of livelihoods, food, and fuel, with more than 1,600,000,000 people depending directly on forests for their livelihoods. (7) The Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found in 2019 that the rate of global species extinction is accelerating and is now tens to hundreds of times higher than the average rate over the last 10,000,000 years, threatening the loss of 1,000,000 species, and illegal land-use change has an overwhelming relative impact on terrestrial