Amazon Deforestation

Why Earth's largest rainforest is being destroyed

The world's rainforests do many vital things, from providing habitat for millions of species to regulating the world's climate and rainfall patterns that we all depend upon.  By far the world's largest rainforest, the Amazon, is under threat of deforestation and degradation from human activities.  If we ignore what's happening there, we risk not only a regional loss but a change in the global climate system.

The Amazon rainforest is a dense tropical broadleaf forest in the Amazon basin that stretches across northern South America, spanning Brazil, Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname, Ecuador, and French Guiana.  Covering roughly 800 million hectares biogeographically, the "Amazon rainforest" is about the size of the United States.  It's home to about 16,000 tree species and 2.5 million species of insects.  It contains countless species that are found nowhere else in the world, and it harbors: 9% of mammals, 14% of birds, 8% of amphibians, 13% of freshwater fish species, and 22% of vascular plant species found on Earth.  Additionally, 47 million humans live there and depend on it, including 2.2 million Indigenous peoples from hundreds of different cultures.

The rainforest is being cut, burned, and degraded at concerning rates.  Between 2001 and 2020, for example, the Amazon lost over 54.2 million hectares, about 9% of its forest.  Since 60% of the Amazon rainforest lies within Brazil, Brazil is the country with the most influence over how it's treated.  Estimates vary for how much of the rainforest has been lost in the last century, but figures hover around 20%.  The World Wildlife Fund reports that 17% has been entirely lost and another 17% degraded.

Why is this happening?

Humans have inhabited the Amazon rainforest for thousands of years.  But those people preferred to keep the rainforest healthy and intact because their lives directly depended on it.  It's only been in recent decades of modernity that the human population, technology, and global economy have grown to the point where the rainforest is viewed as a bank by many.  Since it contains a vast amount of different resources that human interests want to extract, it's gone from a remote, rich ecosystem to a cog in the global economic machine.

The Amazon rainforest continues to shrink because it generates more economic value when cleared than when intact (for the ones doing the clearing).  Global demand for commodities such as beef, leather, soybeans, timber, oil, gas, and minerals drives deforestation.  The forest supplies raw materials to China, Europe, the United States, Russia, and other major markets.  When international demand rises, prices rise, and the incentive to clear more rainforest increases.

About 60% of deforestation in the Amazon can be attributed to cattle ranching.  Ranchers cut and burn the forest to create pasture to graze cattle.  Grazing cattle in the tropics is inefficient, requiring a full hectare per cow.  But the fertility of the soil drops quickly once the rainforest is cleared.  In about six years, every cow may require five hectares.  But the real money isn't all in producing beef and leather.  The animals are often just a vehicle for land grabbing.  In many parts of the Amazon, land gains market value only after it has been cleared.  Raising cattle demonstrates “productive use,” which, under Brazilian law, strengthens claims to ownership.  This creates a land speculation cycle: clear forest, graze cattle long enough to assert possession, and then sell the cleared property.

Bigger companies and developers are often the ones who sponsor the smaller farmers and "settlers" to clear the land.  Private investors often facilitate settlement in the Amazon as a deliberate strategy for land grabbing.  They recruit and fund migrants from Brazilian cities to occupy forested areas, sometimes invading legally protected zones such as Indigenous territories, National Parks, and private forest reserves.  These settlers, called grileiros, clear the land and remain there just long enough to establish a claim of ownership, even if it's legally weak.  Once the land can be sold or transferred, the sponsors take control, and the grileiros move on to repeat the process in a new area of forest.

Historically, governments encouraged subsistence agriculture as part of colonization policies designed to relieve urban crowding by relocating people to rural frontier lands.  In Brazil, programs granted poor families parcels of the Amazon forest.  The Trans-Amazonian Highway, built in the 1970s, opened vast new areas to settlement.  Once settlers arrived, they cleared the forest for farming.  Although colonization programs slowed in the twenty-first century, they did not stop.  Brazil’s National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (INCRA) continues resettlement efforts.

Agriculture in general has played a large role in shaping Amazon land use.  Once soybean varieties were developed that could thrive in humid conditions, soy production expanded rapidly during the 1990s and early 2000s.  Soy contributed to deforestation in two ways.  Directly, the forest was cut to establish soy fields.  Indirectly, soy farming increased land prices, encouraged road construction, and pushed ranchers and small farmers deeper into the forest.  Even where soy no longer drives deforestation in Brazil at the same scale as before, it remains a major contributor in Bolivia and Paraguay.  Other crops such as rice, corn, and sugarcane follow the same pattern.  They raise the value of cleared land, which increases the pressure to remove forest.

Logging plays a role, too.  Timber extraction is supposed to require permits and follow designated cutting plans.  In practice, illegal logging remains rampant.  Logging companies build roads to reach valuable hardwoods that are considered exotic and expensive to buyers.  Those roads change the landscape.  Research shows that selectively logged areas are eight times more likely to be settled and later converted to agriculture than untouched forests, due to easier access.  Logging rarely removes entire forests, but it fragments them.  It seeds deforestation by giving ranchers and farmers a way in.

Infrastructure amplifies the trend.  Hydroelectric dams have flooded large areas of forest.  The Balbina dam alone submerged roughly 240,000 hectares.  Today, new dams function less as power sources for cities and more as energy supplies for industrial mining and agriculture.  More than a hundred dams are planned in the Amazon basin.  Each dam requires clearing for construction, transmission lines, and worker access.

High global prices for metals introduce mining pressure.  Gold mining, both industrial and small-scale, has boomed over the past two decades.  A study found that areas damaged by small-scale mining increased by roughly 4 times in only thirteen years.  Rising gold prices during the COVID-19 pandemic led to new invasions of protected areas.  Illegal miners, called garimpeiros in Brazil, moved into Indigenous territories and remote river basins.  Mining leaves behind scars of sediment plumes, contaminated water, and abandoned pits.

Of course, oil and gas development affects the rainforest too.  The drilling sites themselves remove relatively little forest, but the pipelines, roads, and storage facilities required to support extraction enable access into previously undisturbed areas.  Pollution from spills and waste contributes to degradation, even where deforestation acreage remains small.

Policy

Political leadership affects the health of the Amazon rainforest significantly.  President Lula da Silva, who supports protecting the forest, slashed deforestation rates to about a quarter from 2004 to 2010.  When Jair Bolsonaro (think, Trump of Brazil) became president of Brazil in January 2019, he promised to expand extractive industries and agribusiness in the Amazon.  He dismissed environmental agencies as obstacles and portrayed Indigenous groups as barriers to development.  His administration weakened enforcement, reduced funding for monitoring and fines, and eased access for mining, logging, and ranching.  Within months, deforestation rates rose sharply, reaching levels not seen since the mid-2000s.  His policies signaled that clearing land would not bring consequences.  (In November 2024, Bolsonaro was formally charged with plotting a coup d'état, violent abolition of the democratic rule of law, and criminal organization.)  Since Lula da Silva was reelected and took office in January 2023, deforestation rates have roughly halved since Bolsonaro's term.

Efforts to reduce deforestation have been shown to help.  In the mid-2000s, Brazil implemented a set of measures that coordinated government enforcement, industry restrictions, and transparency.  The turning point came in 2006 with the Amazon Soy Moratorium.  Major soy companies agreed not to purchase soy grown on land deforested after July 24 of that year.  The moratorium came after a Greenpeace investigation that linked global soy supply chains to newly deforested land.  The agreement forced traders and producers to verify sourcing and stop buying soy connected to recent clearing.

A similar initiative followed in 2009.  Major slaughterhouses and the Brazilian government signed the “Cattle Agreement,” which required buyers to exclude ranches involved in illegal deforestation or slave labor.  State-owned banks began conditioning low-interest loans on environmental compliance.  For several years, deforestation slowed.  Global observers praised Brazil for achieving some of the most successful reductions in tropical deforestation ever recorded.

However, the effectiveness of those agreements depended on strict monitoring.  By the early 2010s, enforcement weakened.  Investigations revealed that slaughterhouses were “laundering” cattle—purchasing animals from ranches that appeared legal but had obtained the cattle from illegally cleared land.  The oversight system broke down.  While soy-linked deforestation decreased significantly in Brazil, ranching overtook it again as the leading driver of forest loss.  Neighboring countries such as Peru, Bolivia, and Colombia did not adopt similar cattle agreements, and cattle ranching there continues to expand into forest regions.

Local and Global Climatic Effects

The Amazon rainforest both affects the global climate and is affected by it.  Its trees release immense amounts of water vapor that generate clouds and rainfall across South America, while also storing an estimated 100–120 billion metric tons of carbon—roughly 10 years’ worth of global fossil fuel emissions.  According to a study by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the atmosphere above the Amazon Rainforest is getting drier.

"We observed that in the last two decades, there has been a significant increase in dryness in the atmosphere as well as in the atmospheric demand for water above the rainforest," said JPL's Armineh Barkhordarian

Rising greenhouse gas concentrations and the subsequent global temperature rise account for roughly half of the Amazon’s increasing dryness, while the rest stems from direct human actions, especially the burning of forests to create farmland and pasture.  When forests burn, they emit microscopic particles known as aerosols, including black carbon, or soot.  Unlike lighter aerosols that reflect sunlight, black carbon absorbs it, warming the surrounding air.  This heating effect not only raises atmospheric temperatures but also disrupts the formation of clouds and reduces rainfall across the region.

Trees in the Amazon normally pull water from the soil and release it into the atmosphere through transpiration.  That process generates clouds and rainfall ("flying rivers"), helping sustain the forest.  But with less moisture in the air and lower soil water availability, trees must work harder to transpire and cool themselves.  The JPL study warns that “the demand is increasing, the supply is decreasing” and suggests that if the trend continues, the forest may struggle to sustain itself.

Locally, this drying affects the climate by lengthening the dry season, reducing rainfall frequency, and making the forest more vulnerable to drought and fire.  In parts of the southern Amazon, the wet season has already begun up to a month later than it did decades ago.  The dryness makes it easier for the land-clearers to burn the forest.

Globally, the Amazon’s weakening moisture cycle undermines its role as a climate regulator.  As the forest loses its capacity to recycle water via transpiration and cloud formation, the regional atmospheric circulation shifts.  That in turn means less rainfall not only within the forest but potentially in distant agricultural regions that depend on the Amazon’s “flying rivers” of moisture.  Moreover, when trees die or burn, the carbon they stored returns to the atmosphere.

Future of the Amazon

So what's a sustainable rate of deforestation in the Amazon?  Zero.  Even if deforestation rates drop to zero, there's still much less of it than decades ago.  While nature has the capacity to heal itself, rainforest ecosystems take centuries, even without the pressure of human activity.  Once it's gone, it's gone for a very long time.  Some trees in the Amazon are over 1,000 years old, and they support tens of thousands of other species in a complex web of life.  The rainforest isn't just a group of trees.  It takes time for different stages of growth and ecological succession to occur.  The burning, grazing, and development of the former rainforest destroy not only the trees and life that's there, but also the soil microbiology and seeds needed to start the next generation.

The best thing to do is to stop clearing existing rainforest.  Then, efforts to actively restore it can kickstart the recovery process.

Many Indigenous peoples have taken to defending the forest—their homeland—from intruders intent on destroying it.  But they can only do so much, and conflicts have turned violent.  The documentaries "Guardians of the Amazon" and "The Territory" showcase these conflicts.

The direct mechanisms of deforestation are ranching, land grabbing, soy, subsistence farming, logging, mining, oil, and gas.  They follow the same pattern.  First, access is created, usually by a road.  Next, land value rises.  Finally, forest is cleared for economic gain.  The drivers vary in scale and legality, but the outcome is consistent.

The Amazon rainforest is on the short end of globalization and collective action problems.  As world demand for beef rises, so too will the incentive to clear-cut the Amazon.  So long as wealthy customers in developed nations are willing to pay a lot of money for exotic hardwoods like Ipê, Mahogany, Ebony, Tigerwood, Jatobá, Sucupira, and Cumaru, there will be black and grey markets to cut down the Amazon's old-growth trees.  If some new technology requires minerals that happen to be located in the Amazon, that region's ecosystem will have its fate sealed.

Simply, cleared land is profitable; standing forest is not. 

Until that economic reality changes, deforestation will continue.

Standing forest needs to be considered more valuable than clearing it for pasture, crops, wood, or land grabs.

The good news is that there are things we can do to preserve what remains.  We can strengthen enforcement and monitoring, protect Indigenous land rights, and support Indigenous stewardship.  We can monitor supply chains and demand better labeling and tracking of where the things we buy come from.  We can support local communities and alternative economic models.  We can restore degraded lands, promote sustainable land use, and incentivize reforestation efforts.  We can develop the discipline to halt frontier expansion and value nature for its own sake.

What kind of ancestors will we be?  What kind of co-inhabitants?

Ethical stewardship?  Or not?

We can choose.

"A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise." - Aldo Leopold

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NASA Science. (2020, March 20). New study shows the Amazon makes its own rainy season. https://science.nasa.gov/science-research/earth-science/climate-science/new-study-shows-the-amazon-makes-its-own-rainy-season/

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Science News Explores. (2023, May 2). Why the Amazon Rainforest is in trouble: Climate and deforestation. https://www.snexplores.org/article/why-amazon-rainforest-in-trouble-climate-deforestation

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