Amazon forest loses area the size of Germany and France

BRASIL

The Amazon rainforest has lost an area about the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation in four decades, fueling drought and record wildfires across South America, experts have said.

The world's biggest jungle, spanning nine countries, is crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

However, researchers say a record spate of wildfires this year has instead released massive amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.

Various scientific reports have laid out the grim links between forest loss and a changing climate and the devastation that can follow for humans and wildlife.

Deforestation, mainly for mining and agricultural purposes, has led to the loss of 12.5 percent of the Amazon's plant cover from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.

This amounts to 88 million hectares (880,000 square kilometers, 339,773 square miles) of forest cover lost across Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.

"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 mining," said RAISG experts.

"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," Sandra Rio Caceres, from the Institute of the Common Good, a Peruvian association that contributed to the study, told AFP.

She believes the loss of vegetation in the Amazon is directly linked to severe drought and wildfires affecting several South American countries.

The Copernicus atmosphere monitoring service said on Sept. 23 the fires in the Amazon and Pantanal wetlands were the worst in almost two decades.