(Rio de Janeiro) Red alert for the largest tropical forest on the planet: deforestation and devastating fires in the Amazon, which plays a crucial role in combating global warming, pose the risk of “irreversible consequences”, warn NGOs and experts.
In less than four decades, an area almost as large as Colombia has been deforested in the region, according to a study by the Amazonian Network of Socio-Environmental and Geographic Information (RAISG), a collective of researchers and NGOs, to which AFP had access on Monday.
Also on Monday, the European Copernicus Observatory sounded the alarm: the Amazon and the Pantanal wetland, another biodiversity sanctuary located further south, have experienced their “worst fires in two decades” in recent months.
As a result, carbon emissions were “significantly above average, breaking regional and national records,” “seriously” affecting air quality across South America.
The “increasingly extreme and frequent” climatic events favored by deforestation “continue to affect an already weakened Amazon, both in its capacity for regeneration and in its role in regulating the planet’s climate,” summarizes the RAISG study.
The Amazon is of great importance for the climate due to the absorption of enormous quantities of CO2.
“Act now”
“South American presidencies must now, more than ever, take urgent action to avoid a climate catastrophe that could have irreversible consequences. Action is needed now,” said Ana Piquer, Americas director at Amnesty International, in an open letter published Monday.
Amnesty is calling for “greater efforts to abandon fossil fuels, transform the current model of industrial agriculture, protect indigenous peoples and provide guarantees to environmental defenders.”
In the Amazon, deforestation destroyed 12.5% of the vegetation cover from 1985 to 2023, according to satellite data analyzed by RAISG.
More than 88 million hectares have been deforested in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
RAISG specialists report an “accelerated transformation” in the Amazon, identifying an “alarming increase” in the use of land previously occupied by forest to install mines (+1063%), crops (+598%) or livestock (+297%).
“A large number of ecosystems have disappeared to give way to immense expanses of pastures, soybean fields or other monocultures, or have been transformed into craters for gold extraction,” they warn.
CO emissions2 on the rise
“With the loss of the forest, we emit more carbon into the atmosphere and this disrupts an entire ecosystem that regulates the climate and the hydrological cycle, clearly affecting temperatures,” explains Sandra Ríos Cáceres, from the Institute of the Common Good, a Peruvian association that took part in the study.
This specialist believes that the loss of vegetation cover in the Amazon is directly linked to “the extreme events that we are experiencing”, in particular the severe drought and vegetation fires that are ravaging several South American countries.
Some tributaries of the Amazon are at their lowest levels in decades, threatening the way of life of some 47 million people who live on their banks.
Despite efforts by countries such as Brazil and Colombia to reduce deforestation in the Amazon, 3.8 million hectares of tropical forest were cleared in the region last year, the highest level in two decades, an area almost the size of Switzerland.
In Brazil, which will host COP30, the UN climate conference, in Belém in 2025, the number of fires since January has already exceeded the total for the whole of last year (200,013 compared to 189,926), according to data from the Institute for Space Studies (INPE). The government of the largest country in Latin America points the finger of blame in many cases at the hands of “criminals”.
According to Copernicus, the cumulative emissions total since the beginning of the year are “higher than average, at 183 megatons of CO2 until September 19, following the pace of record emissions in 2007.”
This is also the year that saw the record number of fires identified in Brazil (393,915), according to INPE.