RIO DE JANEIRO, SEPT 24 – The Amazon rainforest has lost an area almost the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation in four decades, causing drought and record-breaking forest fires across South America, experts said yesterday.
The world’s largest forest, which spans nine countries, is vital in the fight against climate change because of its ability to absorb earth-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
However, researchers say this year’s record-setting forest fires have released large amounts of carbon dioxide back into the atmosphere.
Various scientific reports have underlined the grim link between forest loss and climate change and the devastation it can cause to humans and wildlife.
Deforestation, mainly for mining and agriculture, has caused the loss of 12.5 percent of vegetation in the Amazon from 1985 to 2023, according to RAISG, a collective of researchers and NGOs.
It is equivalent to 88 million hectares of forest area lost in Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana.
“A large number of ecosystems have disappeared to make room for vast grazing areas, soybean fields or other monoculture crops, or have been turned into craters for gold mining,” RAISG experts said.
“By losing forests, we release more carbon into the atmosphere and this disrupts the entire ecosystem that regulates the climate as well as the hydrological cycle, which obviously affects the temperature,” said Sandra Rio Caceres of the Institute for the Public Good, an association from Peru that also contributed to the study said, to AFP.
He believes that the loss of vegetation in the Amazon is directly related to the severe droughts and forest fires that hit several countries in South America.
The atmospheric monitoring service Copernicus said yesterday that the fires in the Amazon forest and Pantanal wetlands were the worst in almost two decades. – AFP
