case study of amazon rainforest

• ORIENTATION
• ASSIGNMENTS
• Program Home Page
• LIBRARY RESOURCES
• Getting Help
• Engaging Course Concepts

Case Study: The Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon in context

Tropical rainforests are often considered to be the “cradles of biodiversity.” Though they cover only about 6% of the Earth’s land surface, they are home to over 50% of global biodiversity. Rainforests also take in massive amounts of carbon dioxide and release oxygen through photosynthesis, which has also given them the nickname “lungs of the planet.” They also store very large amounts of carbon, and so cutting and burning their biomass contributes to global climate change. Many modern medicines are derived from rainforest plants, and several very important food crops originated in the rainforest, including bananas, mangos, chocolate, coffee, and sugar cane.

In order to qualify as a tropical rainforest, an area must receive over 250 centimeters of rainfall each year and have an average temperature above 24 degrees centigrade, as well as never experience frosts. The Amazon rainforest in South America is the largest in the world. The second largest is the Congo in central Africa, and other important rainforests can be found in Central America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Brazil contains about 40% of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest. Its rainforest covers an area of land about 2/3 the size of the continental United States.

There are countless reasons, both anthropocentric and ecocentric, to value rainforests. But they are one of the most threatened types of ecosystems in the world today. It’s somewhat difficult to estimate how quickly rainforests are being cut down, but estimates range from between 50,000 and 170,000 square kilometers per year. Even the most conservative estimates project that if we keep cutting down rainforests as we are today, within about 100 years there will be none left.

How does a rainforest work?

Rainforests are incredibly complex ecosystems, but understanding a few basics about their ecology will help us understand why clear-cutting and fragmentation are such destructive activities for rainforest biodiversity.

High biodiversity in tropical rainforests means that the interrelationships between organisms are very complex. A single tree may house more than 40 different ant species, each of which has a different ecological function and may alter the habitat in distinct and important ways. Ecologists debate about whether systems that have high biodiversity are stable and resilient, like a spider web composed of many strong individual strands, or fragile, like a house of cards. Both metaphors are likely appropriate in some cases. One thing we can be certain of is that it is very difficult in a rainforest system, as in most other ecosystems, to affect just one type of organism. Also, clear cutting one small area may damage hundreds or thousands of established species interactions that reach beyond the cleared area.

Pollination is a challenge for rainforest trees because there are so many different species, unlike forests in the temperate regions that are often dominated by less than a dozen tree species. One solution is for individual trees to grow close together, making pollination simpler, but this can make that species vulnerable to extinction if the one area where it lives is clear cut. Another strategy is to develop a mutualistic relationship with a long-distance pollinator, like a specific bee or hummingbird species. These pollinators develop mental maps of where each tree of a particular species is located and then travel between them on a sort of “trap-line” that allows trees to pollinate each other. One problem is that if a forest is fragmented then these trap-line connections can be disrupted, and so trees can fail to be pollinated and reproduce even if they haven’t been cut.

The quality of rainforest soils is perhaps the most surprising aspect of their ecology. We might expect a lush rainforest to grow from incredibly rich, fertile soils, but actually, the opposite is true. While some rainforest soils that are derived from volcanic ash or from river deposits can be quite fertile, generally rainforest soils are very poor in nutrients and organic matter. Rainforests hold most of their nutrients in their live vegetation, not in the soil. Their soils do not maintain nutrients very well either, which means that existing nutrients quickly “leech” out, being carried away by water as it percolates through the soil. Also, soils in rainforests tend to be acidic, which means that it’s difficult for plants to access even the few existing nutrients. The section on slash and burn agriculture in the previous module describes some of the challenges that farmers face when they attempt to grow crops on tropical rainforest soils, but perhaps the most important lesson is that once a rainforest is cut down and cleared away, very little fertility is left to help a forest regrow.

What is driving deforestation in the Amazon?

Many factors contribute to tropical deforestation, but consider this typical set of circumstances and processes that result in rapid and unsustainable rates of deforestation. This story fits well with the historical experience of Brazil and other countries with territory in the Amazon Basin.

Population growth and poverty encourage poor farmers to clear new areas of rainforest, and their efforts are further exacerbated by government policies that permit landless peasants to establish legal title to land that they have cleared.

At the same time, international lending institutions like the World Bank provide money to the national government for large-scale projects like mining, construction of dams, new roads, and other infrastructure that directly reduces the forest or makes it easier for farmers to access new areas to clear.

The activities most often encouraging new road development are timber harvesting and mining. Loggers cut out the best timber for domestic use or export, and in the process knock over many other less valuable trees. Those trees are eventually cleared and used for wood pulp, or burned, and the area is converted into cattle pastures. After a few years, the vegetation is sufficiently degraded to make it not profitable to raise cattle, and the land is sold to poor farmers seeking out a subsistence living.

Regardless of how poor farmers get their land, they often are only able to gain a few years of decent crop yields before the poor quality of the soil overwhelms their efforts, and then they are forced to move on to another plot of land. Small-scale farmers also hunt for meat in the remaining fragmented forest areas, which reduces the biodiversity in those areas as well.

Another important factor not mentioned in the scenario above is the clearing of rainforest for industrial agriculture plantations of bananas, pineapples, and sugar cane. These crops are primarily grown for export, and so an additional driver to consider is consumer demand for these crops in countries like the United States.

These cycles of land use, which are driven by poverty and population growth as well as government policies, have led to the rapid loss of tropical rainforests. What is lost in many cases is not simply biodiversity, but also valuable renewable resources that could sustain many generations of humans to come. Efforts to protect rainforests and other areas of high biodiversity is the topic of the next section.

Case Study: The Amazonian Road Decision

The proposed Pucallpa–Cruzeiro do Sul will connect the Amazon’s interior to urban centers and export markets in Peru and Brazil. However, critics are worried that the road will also create new opportunities for illegal logging and infringe on the territory of indigenous communities and wildlife.

Biology, Geography, Human Geography

Loading ...

On the western edge of the Amazon River, there is a proposal to construct a road. This road would connect the remote town of Cruzeiro do Sul, Brazil, with the larger city of Pucallpa, Peru. The construction of the road has become a subject of contentious debate. Proponents of the road claimed that it would provide an efficient way for rural farmers and tradesmen to get their goods to city markets. They claimed it would also allow loggers to more easily transport timber from the depths of the Amazon rainforest to sawmills. From the sawmills in Pucallpa, goods could be transported to Peru’s Pacific coast and shipped to international buyers. Critics of the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road, however, argue that it would cut right through traditional territories of the Ashéninka, an indigenous people of eastern Peru. Many leaders fear the road will increase access to previously undeveloped rainforest, threatening the ecosystem and the Ashéninka way of life. Large trees, such as mahogany, for example, will catch the eye of illegal loggers because of their high market value. The great mahogany trees also serve as protection to the Ashéninka from the outside world and are essential for the health of the Amazonian rainforest. The trees provide shelter, food, and nesting grounds that sustain the vast biodiversity within the ecosystem, an ecosystem the Ashéninka have come to depend on for their own food, shelter, and life sustenance. Geography The Amazon Basin is located in South America, covering an area of seven million square kilometers (2.7 million square miles). Nearly 70 percent of the basin falls within Brazil with remaining areas stretching into parts of Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia, Venezuela, and Guyana. The Amazon’s massive drainage basin is made of dozens of smaller watersheds , including the Tamaya. Its watershed lies at the headwaters of the Purus and Juruá Rivers, near the border of Peru and Brazil. The Ashéninka people have lived in this region for centuries, surviving on game, fish, and cultivated crops, such as yucca roots, sweet potato, corn, coffee, and sugar cane. Background The rainforest surrounding the Amazon is the largest on the entire planet. In addition to 33 million human inhabitants, including 385 distinct Indigenous groups, it hosts the greatest diversity of plant and animal life in the world. More than two million species of insects are native to the region, including many tree-living species and hundreds of spiders and butterflies. Primates are abundant—including howler, spider, and capuchin monkeys—along with sloths, snakes, and iguanas. Brightly colored parrots, toucans, and parakeets are just some of the region’s native birds. Many of these species are unique to the Amazon rainforest, which means they cannot be found anywhere else in the world. At a global level, the Amazon rainforest helps to regulate climate and acts as a carbon sink for greenhouse gases . At a national level, the Amazon is considered a source of energy and income, based on production and commercialization of raw materials. Some of the most valued tree species in the world thrive in the rainforest. Mahogany is one of the most valuable resources from the Amazon forest. The tree’s rich, red grain and durability make it one of the most coveted building materials in the world. A single mahogany tree can fetch thousands of U.S. dollars on the international market. Even though logging is prohibited in much of the Amazon River, it is legal in some areas in large part because the sale of the wood is so lucrative. The high demand for mahogany has left many of Peru’s watersheds—such as the Tamaya—stripped of their most valuable trees. Without large trees, and their roots, the watershed risks heavy flooding and soil erosion. Conflict The Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road is part of a larger development plan to link South America’s remote, isolated economies through new transportation, energy, and telecommunications projects. Tension exists between communities that favor developing the rural economies of the Amazon Basin and those who favor preserving its forested areas and diversity of life. The Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA) is a proposal for the construction of several highways throughout the continent, five of them within the western Amazon Basin. The Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road is one such proposed highway. Supporters of the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road say international demand for Amazonian resources could help develop the rural economies that are scattered throughout the basin. In addition to providing a route of access for rural goods to enter the global market, the road will allow members of rural communities to access better health care, education, and welfare. This could lead to improved living conditions, healthier lifestyles, and longer life spans. Conservationists are concerned that infrastructure such as the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road will devastate an already weakened Amazonian ecosystem, as road access is highly correlated with  deforestation . In Brazil, for instance, 80 percent of deforestation occurs within 48.28 kilometers (30 miles) of a road. Critics argue that the construction of a road along the Brazil-Peru corridor will provide easier access for loggers to reach mahogany and other trees. Indigenous communities like the Ashéninka will also be affected. These communities have largely chosen to maintain a traditional way of life, and conservationists are concerned that the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road may expose them to disease and land theft. Identification of Stakeholders Indigenous Communities:  Members of the Ashéninka community are trying to protect the forest and their native lands. Yet, like other Indigenous communities in the area, they are in turmoil, largely divided between those favoring conservation and those seeking greater economic opportunities. While the Ashéninka want to preserve their culture and connections to the forest, they also need access to things like clothes, soap, and medicine. The road could establish trade routes that make these goods more accessible. However, isolated peoples could be exposed to disease and land theft. Wildlife:  The proposed Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road runs through Serra do Divisor National Park, Brazil, and other reserves that are home to threatened and rare species, including mammals, reptiles, and birds. For some of these species, such as the spider monkey and red howler monkey, the construction of the road could make their populations vulnerable to fragmentation and more visible to hunters. As mahogany and other canopy giants are removed, any wildlife that relies on the trees for shelter, nesting, or food will need to relocate. Amazonian Ecosystem:  In addition to the detrimental effects to the flora and fauna in the area, the construction of the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road could accelerate erosion, reduce water quality, and increase deforestation for agriculture and timber extraction. Tropical forest accounts for 40 percent of the global terrestrial carbon sink. A reduced number of trees could exacerbate global warming. Fewer forests means larger amounts of greenhouse gases entering the atmosphere. Logging Companies:  If a road is constructed, loggers will have easier access to mahogany and other trees, allowing them to generate more income and provide a higher standard of living for their families and communities. A higher standard of living might include expanded educational opportunities, improved healthcare facilities, and the chance to participate in political debate. Residents of Rural Communities:  The Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road would allow local farmers and business people to transfer goods from the Amazonian interior to Peru’s Pacific coast. Right now, merchants who want to travel between Cruzeiro do Sul and Pucallpa must do so by plane. A reliable road would improve basic infrastructure, transportation, and communication for greater commercial and social integration between Peru and Brazil, which meets part of the larger objective of the Initiative for the Integration of Regional Infrastructure in South America. International Consumers:  The global demand for mahogany makes it a multimillion dollar business. Mahogany is used to create bedroom sets, cabinets, flooring, and patio decks throughout the world, mostly in the United States and Europe. Conflict Mitigation Groups are seeking to mitigate conflict in the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road conflict through dialogue and alternate infrastructure plans. Environmental conservation groups have suggested that the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road be removed from the list of approved projects until the community engages in greater communication surrounding two aspects of the project. First, conservationists are seeking more information on the environmental impact of the construction. This discussion involves local environmental groups, government representatives, and businesses. Second, conservationists are seeking full consent to the project from indigenous communities. Some critics of the Pucallpa-Cruzeiro do Sul road argue that roads are not the only option for the Pucallpa business community to extend its commerce. Traditional river systems are already in place. These critics think the fluvial network should be explored as a viable alternative to road construction. The Upper Amazon Conservancy is working with indigenous peoples to help protect their native territories. One initiative involves organizing community “vigilance committees” that consist of members of indigenous peoples who help park services by patrolling the edges of national parks and keeping illegal loggers out.

Media Credits

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Research Manager

Educator reviewer, expert reviewer, last updated.

October 19, 2023

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

• 0 Shopping Cart

Sustainable Management of the Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon rainforest is located in the north of South America, spanning an area of around 8 million km2 including parts of Brazil, Columbia, Peru, Venezuela, Ecuador Bolivia, Suriname, Guyana and French Guyana.

In some areas of the Amazon rainforest, sustainable management strategies are in place to ensure people today can get the resources they need in a way that ensures future generations can also benefit from the ecosystem .

Sustainable management strategies are affected by political and economic factors .

Governance 

Governance relates to control of rainforests and who has a say in how rainforests are used. In some areas, rainforests are protected by national and international laws.

In Brazil, the largest protected area of rainforest is the Central Amazon Conservation Complex (CACC) . The CACC covers 60000 km2 as is classified as a World Heritage Site by the United Nations, which means it is protected by international treaties. Limits are placed on hunting , logging and fishing and access is limited.

Central Amazon Conservation Complex (CACC)

In other areas local communities, with the help of NGOs, are involved in rainforest governance. In Columbia, an organisation known as Natütama is working with the local community in Puerto Nariño to protect river species such as the Amazon River dolphin. Local people are employed to teach members of the community on how to protect habitats and endangered river species. Local fishermen collect information about the number and distribution of species and report illegal hunting.

Commodity Value

Commodity value means assigning a value to different good and services in a rainforest. Sustainable management ensures rainforests are worth. more than the value of the timber and other resources that can be extracted, such as gold. An example of this is sustainable foresty, which balances the removal of trees to sell with the conservation of the forest.

Selective logging involves only removing a small number of trees, allowing the forest to regenerate naturally. This saves money in the long run as logging companies do not need to replace felled trees.

Sustainable logging companies such as Precious Woods Amazon place limits on the number of trees being cut down so the rainforest can recover. They also use a range of species so that none are over-exploited.

International agreements try to reduce illegal logging and ensure timber comes from sustainable sources. The Forestry Stewardship Council allows the use of its logo by companies that operate in a sustainable way so consumers know they are buying sustainable timber.

FSC certified wood

Ecotourism is a type of tourism that minimises damage to the environment and benefits local people.

An example of an ecotourism project is the Yachana Lodge in Equador. It is located in a remote area of the Amazon Rainforest where local people rely on subsistence farming.

Yachana Lodge

The project employs local people. This provides a reliable source of income and a better quality of life. The project encourages local people to use the rainforest in a sustainable way so tourists continue to visit.

Volunteers work with local Amazon youth who study at the Yachana Technical High School where learning is focused on five main areas:

• Rainforest conservation
• Sustainable agriculture
• Renewable energy
• Animal husbandry
• Micro-enterprise development .

Tourists are only allowed to visit in small groups, minimising their impact on the environment. Tourists take part in activities that help raise awareness of conservation issues.

Entrance fees are paid by the tourists which are invested in conservation and education projects.

Premium Resources

Please support internet geography.

If you've found the resources on this page useful please consider making a secure donation via PayPal to support the development of the site. The site is self-funded and your support is really appreciated.

Related Topics

Use the images below to explore related GeoTopics.

Sustainable Management of the Rainforest

Topic home, share this:.

• Click to share on Twitter (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Facebook (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on Pinterest (Opens in new window)
• Click to email a link to a friend (Opens in new window)
• Click to share on WhatsApp (Opens in new window)
• Click to print (Opens in new window)

If you've found the resources on this site useful please consider making a secure donation via PayPal to support the development of the site. The site is self-funded and your support is really appreciated.

Search Internet Geography

Top posts and pages.

Latest Blog Entries

Pin It on Pinterest

• Click to share
• Print Friendly

Deforestation, warming flip part of Amazon forest from carbon sink to source

• July 14, 2021

The study area, which represents about 20 percent of the Amazon basin, has lost 30 percent of its rainforest

New results from a nine-year research project in the eastern Amazon rainforest finds that significant deforestation in eastern and southeastern Brazil has been associated with a long-term decrease in rainfall and increase in temperature during the dry season, turning what was once a forest that absorbed carbon dioxide into a source of planet-warming carbon dioxide emissions.

The study, published in the journal Nature , explored whether these changes had altered how much carbon the Amazon stored in its vast forests. 

“Using nearly 10 years of CO 2   (carbon dioxide ) measurements, we found that the more deforested and climate-stressed eastern Amazon, especially the southeast, was a net emitter of CO 2 to the atmosphere, especially as a result of fires,” said John Miller, a scientist with NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory and a co-author. “On the other hand, the wetter, more intact western and central Amazon, was neither a carbon sink nor source of atmospheric CO 2 , with the absorption by healthy forests balancing the emissions from fires.”   

In addition to storing vast amounts of carbon, Amazonia is also one of the wettest places on Earth, storing immense amounts of water in its soils and vegetation. Transpired by leaves, this moisture evaporates into the atmosphere, where it fuels prodigious rainfall, averaging more than seven feet per year across the basin. For comparison the average annual rainfall in the contiguous U.S. is two and half feet. Several studies have estimated that water cycling through evaporation is responsible for 25 to 35 percent of total rainfall in the basin. 

But deforestation and global warming over the last 40 years have affected rainfall and temperature with potential impacts for the Amazon’s ability to store carbon. Conversion of rainforest to agriculture has caused a 17 percent decrease in forest extent in the Amazon, which stretches over an area almost as large as the continental U.S.. Replacing dense, humid forest canopies with drier pastures and cropland has increased local temperatures and decreased evaporation of water from the rainforest, which deprives downwind locations of rainfall. Regional deforestation and selective logging of adjacent forests further reduces forest cover, amplifying the cycle of drying and warming.  This, in turn, can reduce the capacity of the forests to store carbon,  and increase their vulnerability to fires.

The  2.8 million square miles of jungle in the Amazon basin represents more than half of the tropical rainforest remaining on the planet. The Amazon is estimated to contain about 123 billion tons of carbon above and below ground, and is one of Earth’s most important terrestrial carbon reserves. As global fossil-fuel burning has risen, the Amazon has absorbed CO 2 from the atmosphere, helping to moderate global climate.  But there are indications from this study and previous ones that the Amazon’s capacity to act as a sink may be disappearing.

Over the past several decades, intense scientific interest has focused on the question of whether the combined effects of climate change and the ongoing conversion of jungle to pasture and cropland could cause the Amazon to release more carbon dioxide than it absorbs. 

In 2010, lead author Luciana Gatti, who led the international team of scientists from Brazil, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and the Netherlands, set out to explore this question. During the next nine years, Gatti, a scientist with Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research and colleagues obtained airborne measurements of CO 2  and carbon monoxide concentrations above Brazilian Amazonia. Analysis of CO 2 measurements from over 600 aircraft vertical profiles, extending from the surface to around 2.8 miles above sea level at four sites, revealed that total carbon emissions in eastern Amazonia are greater than those in the west. 

“The regions of southern Pará and northern Mato Grosso states represent a worst-case scenario,” said Gatti. 

The southeast region, which represents about 20 percent of the Amazon basin, and has experienced 30 percent deforestation over the previous 40 years. Scientists recorded a 25 percent reduction in precipitation and a temperature increase of at least 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit during the dry months of August, September and October, when trees are already under seasonal stress. Airborne measurements over nine years revealed this region was a net emitter of carbon, mainly as a result of fires, while areas further west, where less than 20 percent of the forest had been removed, sources balanced sinks. The scientists said the increased emissions were likely due to conversion of forest to cropland by burning, and by reduced uptake of CO 2 by the trees that remained. 

These findings help scientists better understand the long-term impacts of interactions between climate and human disturbances on the carbon balance of the world’s largest tropical forest.

“The big question this research raises is if the connection between climate, deforestation, and carbon that we see in the eastern Amazon could one day be the fate of the central and western Amazon, if they become subject to stronger human impact,” Miller said.  Changes in the capacity of tropical forests to absorb carbon will require downward adjustments of the fossil fuel emissions compatible with limiting global mean temperature increases to less than 2.0 or 1.5 degrees Celsius, he added.

This research was supported by NOAA’s Global Monitoring Laboratory and by funding from the State of Sao Paulo Science Foundation, UK Environmental Research Council, NASA, and the European Research Council. 

For more information, contact Theo Stein, NOAA Communications: [email protected]

No sign of greenhouse gases increases slowing in 2023

5 science wins from the 2023 NOAA Science Report

Filling A Data Gap In The Tropical Pacific To Reveal Daily Air-Sea Interactions

Scientists detail research to assess viability and risks of marine cloud brightening

Popup call to action.

A prompt with more information on your call to action.

Amazon Deforestation and Climate Change

Join Gisele Bundchen when she meets with one of Brazil’s top climate scientists to discuss the complexity of the Amazon rainforest and its connection to Earth’s atmosphere.

Anthropology, Geography

High on a tower overlooking the lush Amazon canopy, Gisele Bundchen and Brazilian climate scientist Antonio Nobre talk about the importance of the rain forest and the impact of cutting down its trees.

As Nobre explains, the rainforest is not only home to an incredible diversity of species, it also has a critical cooling effect on the planet because its trees channel heat high into the atmosphere. In addition, forests absorb and store carbon dioxide (CO2) from the atmosphere—CO2 that is released back into the atmosphere when trees are cut and burned.

Nobre warns that if deforestation continues at current levels, we are headed for disaster. The Amazon region could become drier and drier, unable to support healthy habitats or croplands.

Find more of this story in the “Fueling the Fire” episode of the National Geographic Channel’s Years of Living Dangerously series.

The Amazon rain forest absorbs one-fourth of the CO2 absorbed by all the land on Earth. The amount absorbed today, however, is 30% less than it was in the 1990s because of deforestation. A major motive for deforestation is cattle ranching. China, the United States, and other countries have created a consumer demand for beef, so clearing land for cattle ranching can be profitable—even if it’s illegal. The demand for pastureland, as well as cropland for food such as soybeans, makes it difficult to protect forest resources.

Many countries are making progress in the effort to stop deforestation. Countries in South America and Southeast Asia, as well as China, have taken steps that have helped reduce greenhouse gas emissions from the destruction of forests by one-fourth over the past 15 years.

Brazil continues to make impressive strides in reducing its impact on climate change. In the past two decades, its CO2 emissions have dropped more than any other country. Destruction of the rain forest in Brazil has decreased from about 19,943 square kilometers (7,700 square miles) per year in the late 1990s to about 5,180 square kilometers (2,000 square miles) per year now. Moving forward, the major challenge will be fighting illegal deforestation.

Articles & Profiles

Instructional links, media credits.

The audio, illustrations, photos, and videos are credited beneath the media asset, except for promotional images, which generally link to another page that contains the media credit. The Rights Holder for media is the person or group credited.

Last Updated

March 11, 2024

User Permissions

For information on user permissions, please read our Terms of Service. If you have questions about how to cite anything on our website in your project or classroom presentation, please contact your teacher. They will best know the preferred format. When you reach out to them, you will need the page title, URL, and the date you accessed the resource.

If a media asset is downloadable, a download button appears in the corner of the media viewer. If no button appears, you cannot download or save the media.

Text on this page is printable and can be used according to our Terms of Service .

Interactives

Any interactives on this page can only be played while you are visiting our website. You cannot download interactives.

Related Resources

Our websites may use cookies to personalize and enhance your experience. By continuing without changing your cookie settings, you agree to this collection. For more information, please see our University Websites Privacy Notice .

UConn Today

• School and College News
• Arts & Culture
• Community Impact
• Entrepreneurship
• Health & Well-Being
• Research & Discovery
• UConn Health
• University Life
• UConn Voices
• University News

September 7, 2021 | Combined Reports - UConn Communications

Study Shows the Impacts of Deforestation and Forest Burning on Biodiversity in the Amazon

Since 2001, between 40,000 and 73,400 square miles of Amazon rainforest have been impacted by fires

Ring of fire: Smoke rises through the understory of a forest in the Amazon region. Plants and animals in the Amazonian rainforest evolved largely without fire, so they lack the adaptations necessary to cope with it. (Credit: Paulo Brando)

A new study, co-authored by a team of researchers including UConn Ecology and Evolutionary Biology researcher Cory Merow provides the first quantitative assessment of how environmental policies on deforestation, along with forest fires and drought, have impacted the diversity of plants and animals in the Amazon. The findings were published in the Sept. 1 issue of Nature .

Researchers used records of more than 14,500 plant and vertebrate species to create biodiversity maps of the Amazon region. Overlaying the maps with historical and current observations of forest fires and deforestation over the last two decades allowed the team to quantify the cumulative impacts on the region’s species.

They found that since 2001, between 40,000 and 73,400 square miles of Amazon rainforest have been impacted by fires, affecting 95% of all Amazonian species and as many as 85% of species that are listed as threatened in this region. While forest management policies enacted in Brazil during the mid-2000s slowed the rate of habitat destruction, relaxed enforcement of these policies coinciding with a change in government in 2019 has seemingly begun to reverse this trend, the authors write. With fires impacting 1,640 to 4,000 square miles of forest, 2019 stands out as one of the most extreme years for biodiversity impacts since 2009, when regulations limiting deforestation were enforced.

“Perhaps most compelling is the role that public pressure played in curbing forest loss in 2019,” Merow says. “When the Brazilian government stopped enforced forest regulations in 2019, each month between January and August 2019 was the worse month on record (e.g. comparing January 2019 to previous January’s) for forest loss in the 20-year history of available data. However, based on international pressure, forest regulation resumed in September 2019, and forest loss declined significantly for the rest of the year, resulting in 2019 looking like an average year compared to the 20-year history.  This was big: active media coverage and public support for policy changes were effective at curbing biodiversity loss on a very rapid time scale.”

The findings are especially critical in light of the fact that at no point in time did the Amazon get a break from those increasing impacts, which would have allowed for some recovery, says senior study author Brian Enquist, a professor in UArizona’s Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology .

“Even with policies in place, which you can think of as a brake slowing the rate of deforestation, it’s like a car that keeps moving forward, just at a slower speed,” Enquist says. “But in 2019, it’s like the foot was let off the brake, causing it to accelerate again.”

Known mostly for its dense rainforests, the Amazon basin supports around 40% of the world’s remaining tropical forests. It is of global importance as a provider of ecosystem services such as scrubbing and storing carbon from the atmosphere, and it plays a vital role in regulating Earth’s climate. The area also is an enormous reservoir of the planet’s biodiversity, providing habitats for one out of every 10 of the planet’s known species. It has been estimated that in the Amazon, 1,000 tree species can populate an area smaller than a half square mile.

“Fire is not a part of the natural cycle in the rainforest,” says study co-author Crystal N. H. McMichael at the University of Amsterdam. “Native species lack the adaptations that would allow them to cope with it, unlike the forest communities in temperate areas. Repeated burning can cause massive changes in species composition and likely devastating consequences for the entire ecosystem.”

Since the 1960s, the Amazon has lost about 20% of its forest cover to deforestation and fires. While fires and deforestation often go hand in hand, that has not always been the case, Enquist says. As climate change brings more frequent and more severe drought conditions to the region, and fire is often used to clear large areas of rainforest for the agricultural industry, deforestation has spillover effects by increasing the chances of wildfires. Forest loss is predicted reach 21 to 40% by 2050, and such habitat loss will have large impacts on the region’s biodiversity, according to the authors.

“Since the majority of fires in the Amazon are intentionally set by people, preventing them is largely within our control,” says study co-author Patrick Roehrdanz, senior manager of climate change and biodiversity at Conservation International. “One way is to recommit to strong antideforestation policies in Brazil, combined with incentives for a forest economy, and replicate them in other Amazonian countries.”

Policies to protect Amazonian biodiversity should include the formal recognition of Indigenous lands, which encompass more than one-third of the Amazon region, the authors write, pointing to previous research showing that lands owned, used or occupied by Indigenous peoples have less species decline, less pollution and better-managed natural resources.

The authors say their study underscores the dangers of continuing lax policy enforcement. As fires encroach on the heart of the Amazon basin, where biodiversity is greatest, their impacts will have more dire effects, even if the rate of forest burning remains unchanged.

The research was made possible by strategic investment funds allocated by the Arizona Institutes for Resilience at UArizona and the university’s Bridging Biodiversity and Conservation Science group. Additional support came from the National Science Foundation’s Harnessing the Data Revolution program . Data and computation were provided through the Botanical Information and Ecology Network , which is supported by CyVerse , the NSF’s data management platform led by UArizona.

Recent Articles

April 19, 2024

A Case of the Possible: Creating the Conditions for K-12 Student Achievement Growth in the Face of COVID-19

Read the article

New UConn Extension Publication Website Shares Answers Connecticut Residents Can Trust

Sustainable Dinosaurs, Seaweed, and Accessibility: Diverse Cohort Selected for CCEI’s 2024 Summer Fellowship – UConn’s Startup Accelerator

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Published: 14 July 2021

Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change

• Luciana V. Gatti   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-4908-8974 1 , 2 ,
• Luana S. Basso 1 ,
• John B. Miller 3 ,
• Manuel Gloor 4 ,
• Lucas Gatti Domingues 1 , 2 , 5 ,
• Henrique L. G. Cassol   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-6728-4712 1 ,
• Graciela Tejada 1 ,
• Luiz E. O. C. Aragão 1 , 6 ,
• Carlos Nobre 7 ,
• Wouter Peters   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-8166-2070 8 , 9 ,
• Luciano Marani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7382-464X 1 ,
• Egidio Arai 1 ,
• Alber H. Sanches   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-7966-2880 1 ,
• Sergio M. Corrêa   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-0038-0790 1 , 10 ,
• Liana Anderson   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0001-9545-5136 11 ,
• Celso Von Randow   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1045-4316 1 ,
• Caio S. C. Correia 1 , 2 ,
• Stephane P. Crispim 1 &
• Raiane A. L. Neves 1  

Nature volume  595 ,  pages 388–393 ( 2021 ) Cite this article

43k Accesses

353 Citations

5247 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Carbon cycle

Amazonia hosts the Earth’s largest tropical forests and has been shown to be an important carbon sink over recent decades 1 , 2 , 3 . This carbon sink seems to be in decline, however, as a result of factors such as deforestation and climate change 1 , 2 , 3 . Here we investigate Amazonia’s carbon budget and the main drivers responsible for its change into a carbon source. We performed 590 aircraft vertical profiling measurements of lower-tropospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and carbon monoxide at four sites in Amazonia from 2010 to 2018 4 . We find that total carbon emissions are greater in eastern Amazonia than in the western part, mostly as a result of spatial differences in carbon-monoxide-derived fire emissions. Southeastern Amazonia, in particular, acts as a net carbon source (total carbon flux minus fire emissions) to the atmosphere. Over the past 40 years, eastern Amazonia has been subjected to more deforestation, warming and moisture stress than the western part, especially during the dry season, with the southeast experiencing the strongest trends 5 , 6 , 7 , 8 , 9 . We explore the effect of climate change and deforestation trends on carbon emissions at our study sites, and find that the intensification of the dry season and an increase in deforestation seem to promote ecosystem stress, increase in fire occurrence, and higher carbon emissions in the eastern Amazon. This is in line with recent studies that indicate an increase in tree mortality and a reduction in photosynthesis as a result of climatic changes across Amazonia 1 , 10 .

This is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution

Access options

Access Nature and 54 other Nature Portfolio journals

Get Nature+, our best-value online-access subscription

24,99 € / 30 days

cancel any time

Subscribe to this journal

Receive 51 print issues and online access

185,98 € per year

only 3,65 € per issue

Buy this article

• Purchase on Springer Link
• Instant access to full article PDF

Prices may be subject to local taxes which are calculated during checkout

Similar content being viewed by others

Large Chinese land carbon sink estimated from atmospheric carbon dioxide data

Jing Wang, Liang Feng, … ChaoZong Xia

Synthesis of the land carbon fluxes of the Amazon region between 2010 and 2020

Thais M. Rosan, Stephen Sitch, … Luiz E. O. C. Aragão

Global fire emissions buffered by the production of pyrogenic carbon

Matthew W. Jones, Cristina Santín, … Stefan H. Doerr

Data availability

The CO 2 VP data that support the findings of this study are available from PANGAEA Data Archiving, at https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.926834 .  Source data are provided with this paper.

Brienen, R. J. W. et al. Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink. Nature 519 , 344–348 (2015).

ADS   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Phillips, O. L. & Brienen, R. J. W. Carbon uptake by mature Amazon forests has mitigated Amazon nations’ carbon emissions. Carbon Balance Manag . 12 , 1 (2017).

PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Hubau, W. et al. Asynchronous carbon sink saturation in African and Amazonian tropical forests. Nature 579 , 80–87 (2020).

Gatti, L. V. et al. Drought sensitivity of Amazonian carbon balance revealed by atmospheric measurements. Nature 506 , 76–80 (2014).

Barkhordarian, A., Saatchi, S. S., Behrangi, A., Loikith, P. C. & Mechoso, C. R. A recent systematic increase in vapor pressure deficit over tropical South America. Sci. Rep . 9 , 15331 (2019).

ADS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Leite-Filho, A. T., de Sousa Pontes, V. Y. & Costa, M. H. Effects of deforestation on the onset of the rainy season and the duration of dry spells in southern Amazonia. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos . 124 , 5268–5281 (2019).

ADS   Google Scholar  

Fu, R. et al. Increased dry-season length over southern Amazonia in recent decades and its implication for future climate projection. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 110 , 18110–18115 (2013).

ADS   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Tan, P. H., Chou, C. & Tu, J. Y. Mechanisms of global warming impacts on robustness of tropical precipitation asymmetry. J. Clim . 21 , 5585–5602 (2008).

Spracklen, D. V., Arnold, S. R. & Taylor, C. M. Observations of increased tropical rainfall preceded by air passage over forests. Nature 489 , 282–285 (2012); corrigendum 494 , 390 (2013).

Doughty, C. E. et al. Drought impact on forest carbon dynamics and fluxes in Amazonia. Nature 519 , 78–82 (2015).

Malhi, Y. et al. The regional variation of aboveground live biomass in old-growth Amazonian forests. Glob. Change Biol . 12 , 1107–1138 (2006).

Cox, P. M., Betts, R. A., Jones, C. D., Spall, S. A. & Totterdell, I. J. Acceleration of global warming due to carbon-cycle feedbacks in a coupled climate model. Nature 408 , 184–187 (2000); erratum 408 , 750 (2000).

Aragão, L. E. O. C. et al. 21st Century drought-related fires counteract the decline of Amazon deforestation carbon emissions. Nat. Commun . 9 , 536 (2018).

Staal, A. et al. Forest-rainfall cascades buffer against drought across the Amazon. Nat. Clim. Chang . 8 , 539–543 (2018).

Costa, M. H. & Foley, J. A. Trends in the hydrologic cycle of the Amazon Basin. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos . 104 , 14189–14198 (1999).

Aragão, L. E. O. C. The rainforest’s water pump. Nature 489 , 217–218 (2012).

ADS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Proyecto MapBiomas Amazonía. Colección [2.0] de los mapas anuales de cobertura y uso del suelo. Mapbiomas_Amazonia http://amazonia.mapbiomas.org/mapas-de-la-coleccion (2020).

Baker, J. C. A. & Spracklen, D. V. Climate benefits of intact Amazon forests and the biophysical consequences of disturbance. Front. For. Glob. Change 2 , 47 (2019).

Almeida, C. T., Oliveira-Júnior, J. F., Delgado, R. C., Cubo, P. & Ramos, M. C. Spatiotemporal rainfall and temperature trends throughout the Brazilian Legal Amazon, 1973–2013. Int. J. Climatol . 37 , 2013–2026 (2017).

Google Scholar  

Marengo, J. A. et al. Changes in climate and land use over the Amazon region: current and future variability and trends. Front. Earth Sci . 6 , 228 (2018).

Costa, M. H. & Pires, G. F. Effects of Amazon and Central Brazil deforestation scenarios on the duration of the dry season in the arc of deforestation. Int. J. Climatol . 30 , 1970–1979 (2010).

Nobre, C. A. et al. Land-use and climate change risks in the amazon and the need of a novel sustainable development paradigm. Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA 113 , 10759–10768 (2016).

Silva, C. V. J. et al. Estimating the multi-decadal carbon deficit of burned Amazonian forests. Environ. Res. Lett . 15 , 114023 (2020).

ADS   CAS   Google Scholar  

van der Werf, G. R. et al. Global fire emissions and the contribution of deforestation, savanna, forest, agricultural, and peat fires (1997–2009). Atmos. Chem. Phys . 10 , 11707–11735 (2010).

NASA/GISS. Global Climate Change, Global Temperature https://climate.nasa.gov/vital-signs/global-temperature/ (accessed 6 March 2020).

Maeda, E. E. et al. Evapotranspiration seasonality across the Amazon Basin. Earth Syst. Dyn . 8 , 439–454 (2017).

Haghtalab, N., Moore, N., Heerspink, B. P. & Hyndman, D. W. Evaluating spatial patterns in precipitation trends across the Amazon basin driven by land cover and global scale forcings. Theor. Appl. Climatol . 140 , 411–427 (2020).

Leite-Filho, A. T., Costa, M. H. & Fu, R. The southern Amazon rainy season: the role of deforestation and its interactions with large-scale mechanisms. Int. J. Climatol . 40 , 2328–2341 (2020).

Esquivel-Muelbert, A. et al. Compositional response of Amazon forests to climate change. Glob. Change Biol . 25 , 39–56 (2019).

Liu, J. et al. Contrasting carbon cycle responses of the tropical continents to the 2015–2016 El Niño. Science 358 , eaam5690 (2017).

PubMed   Google Scholar  

Alkama, R. & Cescatti, A. Biophysical climate impacts of recent changes in global forest cover. Science 351 , 600–604 (2016).

INPE. Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Project (PRODES) http://www.obt.inpe.br/OBT/assuntos/programas/amazonia/prodes (2019).

Eva, H. D. et al. A Proposal for Defining the Geographical Boundaries of Amazonia; Synthesis of the Results from an Expert Consultation Workshop Organized by the European Commission in Collaboration with the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization . Report No. 21808-EN (European Commission, 2005).

Olson, D. M. et al. Terrestrial ecoregions of the world: a new map of life on Earth. Bioscience 51 , 933–938 (2001).

Tans, P. P., Bakwin, P. S. & Guenter, D. W. A feasible Global Carbon Cycle Observing System: a plan to decipher today’s carbon cycle based on observations. Glob. Change Biol . 2 , 309–318 (1996).

Marani, L. et al. Estimation methods of greenhouse gases fluxes and the human influence in the CO 2 removal capability of the Amazon Forest. Rev. Virtual Química 12 , 5 (2020).

Miller, J. B. et al. Airborne measurements indicate large methane emissions from the eastern Amazon basin. Geophys. Res. Lett . 34 , L10809 (2007).

Gatti, L. V. et al. Vertical profiles of CO 2 above eastern Amazonia suggest a net carbon flux to the atmosphere and balanced biosphere between 2000 and 2009. Tellus B 62 , 581–594 (2010).

Basso, L. S. et al. Seasonality and interannual variability of CH 4 fluxes from the eastern Amazon Basin inferred from atmospheric mole fraction profiles. J. Geophys. Res. Atmos . 121 , 168–184 (2016).

D’Amelio, M. T. S., Gatti, L. V., Miller, J. B. & Tans, P. Regional N 2 O fluxes in Amazonia derived from aircraft vertical profiles. Atmos. Chem. Phys . 9 , 8785–8797 (2009).

Gatti Domingues, L. et al. A new background method for greenhouse gases flux calculation based in back-trajectories over the Amazon. Atmosphere 11 , 734 (2020).

Draxler, R. R. HYSPLIT 4 User’s Guide . Technical Memorandum ERL ARL-230 (NOAA, 1999); https://www.arl.noaa.gov/wp_arl/wp-content/uploads/documents/reports/arl-230.pdf

Cassol, H. L. G. et al. Determination of region of influence obtained by aircraft vertical profiles using the density of trajectories from the HYSPLIT model. Atmosphere 11 , 1073 (2020).

Stavrakou, T. et al. How consistent are top-down hydrocarbon emissions based on formaldehyde observations from GOME-2 and OMI? Atmos. Chem. Phys . 15 , 11861–11884 (2015).

Stein, A. F. et al. NOAA’s HYSPLIT atmospheric transport and dispersion modeling system. Bull. Am. Meteorol. Soc . 96 , 2059–2077 (2015).

Berrisford, P. et al. Atmospheric conservation properties in ERA-Interim. Q. J. R. Meteorol. Soc . 137 , 1381–1399 (2011).

Adler, R. et al. The Global Precipitation Climatology Project (GPCP) monthly analysis (New Version 2.3) and a review of 2017 global precipitation. Atmosphere 9 , 138 (2018).

Huffman, G. J. et al. Global precipitation at one-degree daily resolution from multisatellite observations. J. Hydrometeorol . 2 , 36–50 (2001).

Santos, S. R. Q., Sansigolo, C. A., Neves, T. T. A. T. & Santos, A. P. Variabilidade sazonal da precipitação na Amazônia: Validação da série de precipitação mensal do GPCC. Rev. Bras. Geogr. Física 10 , 1721–1729 (2017).

Landerer, F. JPL TELLUS GRACE Level-3 Monthly LAND Water-Equivalent-Thickness Surface-Mass Anomaly Release 6.0 in netCDF/ASCII/GeoTIFF Formats https://podaac.jpl.nasa.gov/dataset/TELLUS_GRAC_L3_JPL_RL06_LND (2019).

Landerer, F. W. & Swenson, S. C. Accuracy of scaled GRACE terrestrial water storage estimates. Wat. Resour. Res . 48 , W04531 (2012).

Giglio, L., Boschetti, L., Roy, D. P., Humber, M. L. & Justice, C. O. The Collection 6 MODIS burned area mapping algorithm and product. Remote Sens. Environ . 217 , 72–85 (2018).

Vermote, E. F., El Saleous, N. Z. & Justice, C. O. Atmospheric correction of MODIS data in the visible to middle infrared: first results. Remote Sens. Environ . 83 , 97–111 (2002).

Justice, C. et al. An overview of MODIS Land data processing and product status. Remote Sens. Environ . 83 , 3–15 (2002).

Friedl, M. A. et al. MODIS Collection 5 global land cover: algorithm refinements and characterization of new datasets. Remote Sens. Environ . 114 , 168–182 (2010).

Huete, A. et al. Overview of the radiometric and biophysical performance of the MODIS vegetation indices. Remote Sens. Environ . 83 , 195–213 (2002).

Dalagnol, R., Wagner, F. H., Galvão, L. S., Oliveira, L. E. & Aragao, C. The MANVI Product: MODIS (MAIAC) Nadir-Solar Adjusted Vegetation Indices (EVI and NDVI) for South America https://zenodo.org/record/3159488#.YLeQtH4o_IU (2019).

de Almeida, C. A. et al. High spatial resolution land use and land cover mapping of the Brazilian Legal Amazon in 2008 using Landsat-5/TM and MODIS data. Acta Amazon . 46 , 291–302 (2016).

Jiang, N. & Riley, M. L. Exploring the utility of the random forest method for forecasting ozone pollution in SYDNEY. Int. J. Environ. Sustain. Dev . 1 , 245–254 (2015).

Stekhoven, D. J. & Buhlmann, P. MissForest–non-parametric missing value imputation for mixed-type data. Bioinformatics 28 , 112–118 (2012).

CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Junninen, H., Niska, H., Tuppurainen, K., Ruuskanen, J. & Kolehmainen, M. Methods for imputation of missing values in air quality data sets. Atmos. Environ . 38 , 2895–2907 (2004).

R Core Team. R: A Language and Environment for Statistical Computing http://www.R-project.org (R Foundation for Statistical Computing, 2018).

Stohl, A., Forster, C., Frank, A., Seibert, P. & Wotawa, G. The Lagrangian particle dispersion model FLEXPART version 6.2. Atmos. Chem. Phys . 5 , 2461–2474 (2005).

Freitas, S. R. et al. The Coupled Aerosol and Tracer Transport model to the Brazilian developments on the Regional Atmospheric Modeling System (CATT-BRAMS) – Part 1: model description and evaluation. Atmos. Chem. Phys . 9 , 2843–2861 (2009).

Download references

Acknowledgements

We thank S. Denning and E. Mitchard for valuable reviews. This work was funded by many projects supporting the long-term measurements: State of Sao Paulo Science Foundation – FAPESP (16/02018-2, 11/51841-0, 08/58120-3, 18/14006-4, 18/14423-4, 18/18493-7, 19/21789-8, 11/17914-0), UK Environmental Research Council (NERC) AMAZONICA project (NE/F005806/1), NASA grants (11-CMS11-0025, NRMJ1000-17-00431), European Research Council (ERC) under Horizon 2020 (649087), 7FP EU (283080), MCTI/CNPq (2013), CNPq (134878/2009-4, 310130/2017-4, 305054/2016-3, 314416/2020-0). We thank the staff at NOAA/GML who provided advice and technical support for air sampling and measurements in Brazil, and the pilots and technical team at aircraft sites who collected the air samples. We thank J. F. Mueller for providing modelled biogenic CO fluxes.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

General Coordination of Earth Science (CGCT), National Institute for Space Research (INPE), São José dos Campos, Brazil

Luciana V. Gatti, Luana S. Basso, Lucas Gatti Domingues, Henrique L. G. Cassol, Graciela Tejada, Luiz E. O. C. Aragão, Luciano Marani, Egidio Arai, Alber H. Sanches, Sergio M. Corrêa, Celso Von Randow, Caio S. C. Correia, Stephane P. Crispim & Raiane A. L. Neves

Nuclear and Energy Research Institute (IPEN), São Paulo, Brazil

Luciana V. Gatti, Lucas Gatti Domingues & Caio S. C. Correia

Global Monitoring Laboratory, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), Boulder, CO, USA

John B. Miller

School of Geography, University of Leeds, Leeds, UK

Manuel Gloor

National Isotope Centre, GNS Science, Lower Hutt, New Zealand

Lucas Gatti Domingues

College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

Luiz E. O. C. Aragão

Institute of Advanced Studies (IEA), University of São Paulo (USP), São Paulo, Brazil

Carlos Nobre

Department of Meteorology and Air Quality, Wageningen University, Wageningen, The Netherlands

Wouter Peters

Centre for Isotope Research, University of Groningen, Groningen, The Netherlands

Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ), Resende, Brazil

Sergio M. Corrêa

National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN), São José dos Campos, Brazil

Liana Anderson

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

L.V.G., M.G. and J.B.M. conceived the basin-wide measurement programme and approach; L.V.G. wrote the paper; all co-authors participated in scientific meetings to interpret the data, and commented on and reviewed the manuscript; L.G.D., A.H.S., L.S.B., H.L.G.C., G.T., L.M. and L.V.G. contributed to the region-of-influence study; L.V.G., H.L.G.C., E.A., L.S.B., S.M.C. and J.B.M. contributed to the climate data weighted analysis; L.G.D., C.S.C.C., S.M.C. and R.A.L.N. contributed to the greenhouse gas concentration analysis; G.T. provided deforestation analyses; J.B.M. and L.V.G. contributed to the estimation of biogenic CO.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Luciana V. Gatti .

Ethics declarations

Competing interests.

The authors declare no competing interests.

Additional information

Peer review information Nature thanks Scott Denning, Edward Mitchard and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work. Peer reviewer reports are available.

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

Extended data figures and tables

Extended data fig. 1 vps, time series and annual mean co 2 concentrations..

a , Time series of mean VPs of the CO 2 mole fractions of the flasks below 1.5 km a.s.l. (red circles) and above 3.8 km a.s.l. (blue circles) for sites SAN, ALF, RBA and TAB_TEF (590 VPs) and the background sites RPB, ASC and CPT. b , Annual mean VPs for the four sites (annual mean per height; see  Methods ). c , Annual mean ΔVP (see  Methods ) for each site and year. d , Annual mean differences between mean CO 2 mole fractions below 1.5 km a.s.l. and means above 3.8 km a.sl. for each site and year (see  Methods ). e , Partial column annual means plotted against annual mean fluxes, by site.

Source data

Extended data fig. 2 regions of influence..

a , Mean quarterly regions of influence for the ALF, SAN, RBA, TEF and TAB sites, averaged between 2010 and 2018, calculated using the density of back-trajectories (see  Methods ). b , Deforestation inside quarterly regions of influence and the Amazon mask (purple line) using data from PRODES 32 (see  Methods ). c , Annual mean regions of influence (trajectory densities) averaged between 2010 and 2018.

Extended Data Fig. 3 Seasonal carbon flux and driver variables.

Average monthly means of potential flux driver variables at sites TAB_TEF, SAN, RBA and ALF in 2010–2018. Grey bands denote the standard deviation of the monthly mean.

Extended Data Fig. 4 Time series of carbon flux and driver variables.

As in Extended Data Fig. 3 , but showing the full time series of monthly means from 2010 to 2018 for SAN, ALF, TAB_TEF and RBA. Grey bands as in Extended Data Fig. 3 , showing the 2010–2018 standard deviation for each month.

Extended Data Fig. 5 ALF NBE drivers.

a , ALF annual mean NBE (NBE = total C flux − fire C flux, in g C m −2  d −1 ) from 2010 to 2018. Error bars are uncertainties related to the background, travel time trajectories, emission ratios CO/CO 2  and natural CO flux (see Methods ). b , Annual mean FC NBE , annual mean temperature and GRACE (equivalent water thickness) satellite soil water storage anomalies.

Extended Data Fig. 6 Amazon carbon fluxes per region.

a , Separation of three regions inside the Amazon Mask (7,256,362 km 2 , purple line). Region 1: area of combined regions of influence for SAN and ALF; region 2: area of combined region of influence for RBA and TAB (2010–2012) and RBA and TEF (2013–2018), excluding region 1; region 3: the remaining area outside regions 1 and 2 and inside the purple line. b , Annual mean fluxes for regions 1, 2 and 3 (total, blue line; fire, red line; NBE, green line).

Extended Data Fig. 7 Mean temperature and precipitation in Amazonia over the past 40 years.

a , Monthly mean temperature in Amazonia in 1979–2018, calculated using ERA Interim (ECMWF) monthly means (see  Methods ). Grey points are monthly mean temperatures from 1979 to 2018. Blue and red circles show decadal monthly mean temperatures for 1979–1988 and 2009–2018, respectively. Error bars denote one standard deviation for the decade. b , Blue circles are annual mean temperatures; green circles show mean temperatures for January, February and March; red circles show mean temperatures for August, September and October. c , As in a , but for precipitation calculated using GPCP version 2.3 (see  Methods ). d , Blue circles are annual total precipitation; green circles are total precipitation for January, February and March; and red circles are total precipitation for August, September and October.

Extended Data Fig. 8 Seasonal temperature and precipitation over the past 40 years.

Monthly precipitation (GPCP v2.3) and monthly mean temperature (ERA-Interim) for TAB, SAN, RBA, ALF and TEF, calculated using spatial weightings from 2010–2018 quarterly regions of influence (Extended Data Fig. 2a ) inside the Amazon mask. Symbols are as in Extended Data Fig. 7 .

Supplementary information

Supplementary information.

This file contains 8 Supplementary Figures and 2 Supplementary Tables – see the guide at the beginning of the file for details.

Peer Review File

Source data fig. 2, source data fig. 3, source data fig. 4, source data extended data fig. 1, rights and permissions.

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Gatti, L.V., Basso, L.S., Miller, J.B. et al. Amazonia as a carbon source linked to deforestation and climate change. Nature 595 , 388–393 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6

Download citation

Received : 11 September 2020

Accepted : 10 May 2021

Published : 14 July 2021

Issue Date : 15 July 2021

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-021-03629-6

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Systematic review of the uncertainty of coral reef futures under climate change.

• Shannon G. Klein
• Cassandra Roch
• Carlos M. Duarte

Nature Communications (2024)

The time since land-use transition drives changes in fire activity in the Amazon-Cerrado region

• Andreia F. S. Ribeiro
• Lucas Santos
• Paulo M. Brando

Communications Earth & Environment (2024)

The new record of drought and warmth in the Amazon in 2023 related to regional and global climatic features

• Jhan-Carlo Espinoza
• Juan Carlos Jimenez
• João Vitor M. Ribeiro

Scientific Reports (2024)

Applying earth system justice to phase out fossil fuels: learning from the injustice of adopting 1.5 °C over 1 °C

• Joyeeta Gupta
• Lisa Jacobson

International Environmental Agreements: Politics, Law and Economics (2024)

An experimental approach to test the effect of temperature increase and nutrient enrichment on Andean aquatic insects

• Silvana Gallegos-Sánchez
• Andrea C. Encalada
• Eduardo Dominguez

Aquatic Sciences (2024)

By submitting a comment you agree to abide by our Terms and Community Guidelines . If you find something abusive or that does not comply with our terms or guidelines please flag it as inappropriate.

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

Sign up for the Nature Briefing newsletter — what matters in science, free to your inbox daily.

Case Study: Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest

Deforestation in the amazon rainforest.

The Amazon rainforest area spans about 8,200,000km 2 across 9 countries, making it the largest rainforest in the world. The tree coverage in 1970 was 4.1m km 2 . In 2018, it was 3.3m km 2 . Between 2001 and 2013, the causes of Amazonian deforestation were:

Pasture and cattle ranching = 63%

Small-scale, subsistence farmers = 12%

Commercial crop farming = 7%

Tree felling and logging = 6%

Other activities = 3%

• E.g. plantations, mining, road-building, and construction.

Impacts of Deforestation in the Amazon

Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has the following environmental and economic impacts:

Environmental impact of Amazonian deforestation

• Photosynthesis by trees in the Amazon absorbs 5% of the world's carbon emissions each year (2bn tons of CO2).
• 100 billion tonnes of carbon are stored in the wood of the trees in the Amazon.
• If the Amazon were completely deforested, it would release the 100bn tonnes and also reduce the amount of carbon dioxide taken out of the atmosphere by 2bn tons each year.
• Trees anchor soil in the ground, bound to their roots. Deforestation damages the topsoil and once this has happened, the fertility of the ground is seriously damaged.

Economic impact of Amazonian deforestation

• Deforestation has fuelled the economic development of poor countries.
• In 2018, Brazil exported $28bn worth of metals. The mining industry creates jobs, exports and helps increase Brazilian people's standard of living.
• Similarly, hydroelectric power plants and cattle farms help to create jobs.
• In 2018, Brazil became the world's largest exporter of beef.
• Rio Tinto, an iron ore mining company employs 47,000 people globally and thousands of these are in Brazil.

The rate of deforestation in the Amazon

• In 2015, the Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff claimed that the rate of deforestation had fallen by 83% and that actually Brazil was going to reforest the Amazon.
• However, the policies under President Temer and President Bolsonaro has reversed Rousseff's plan. In 2019, under Bolsonaro, the rate of deforestation was increasing again.

1 The Challenge of Natural Hazards

1.1 Natural Hazards

1.1.1 Types of Natural Hazards

1.1.2 Hazard Risk

1.1.3 Consequences of Natural Hazards

1.1.4 End of Topic Test - Natural Hazards

1.1.5 Exam-Style Questions - Natural Hazards

1.2 Tectonic Hazards

1.2.1 Tectonic Plates

1.2.2 Tectonic Plates & Convection Currents

1.2.3 Plate Margins

1.2.4 Volcanoes

1.2.5 Effects of Volcanoes

1.2.6 Responses to Volcanic Eruptions

1.2.7 Earthquakes

1.2.8 Earthquakes 2

1.2.9 Responses to Earthquakes

1.2.10 Case Studies: The L'Aquila & Kashmir Earthquakes

1.2.11 Earthquake Case Study: Chile 2010

1.2.12 Earthquake Case Study: Nepal 2015

1.2.13 Living with Tectonic Hazards 1

1.2.14 Living with Tectonic Hazards 2

1.2.15 End of Topic Test - Tectonic Hazards

1.2.16 Exam-Style Questions - Tectonic Hazards

1.2.17 Tectonic Hazards - Statistical Skills

1.3 Weather Hazards

1.3.1 Global Atmospheric Circulation

1.3.2 Surface Winds

1.3.3 UK Weather Hazards

1.3.4 Tropical Storms

1.3.5 Features of Tropical Storms

1.3.6 Impact of Tropical Storms 1

1.3.7 Impact of Tropical Storms 2

1.3.8 Tropical Storms Case Study: Katrina

1.3.9 Tropical Storms Case Study: Haiyan

1.3.10 UK Weather Hazards Case Study: Somerset 2014

1.3.11 End of Topic Test - Weather Hazards

1.3.12 Exam-Style Questions - Weather Hazards

1.3.13 Weather Hazards - Statistical Skills

1.4 Climate Change

1.4.1 Evidence for Climate Change

1.4.2 Causes of Climate Change

1.4.3 Effects of Climate Change

1.4.4 Managing Climate Change

1.4.5 End of Topic Test - Climate Change

1.4.6 Exam-Style Questions - Climate Change

1.4.7 Climate Change - Statistical Skills

2 The Living World

2.1 Ecosystems

2.1.1 Ecosystems

2.1.2 Ecosystem Cascades & Global Ecosystems

2.1.3 Ecosystem Case Study: Freshwater Ponds

2.2 Tropical Rainforests

2.2.1 Tropical Rainforests - Intro & Interdependence

2.2.2 Adaptations

2.2.3 Biodiversity of Tropical Rainforests

2.2.4 Deforestation

2.2.5 Case Study: Deforestation in the Amazon Rainforest

2.2.6 Sustainable Management of Rainforests

2.2.7 Case Study: Malaysian Rainforest

2.2.8 End of Topic Test - Tropical Rainforests

2.2.9 Exam-Style Questions - Tropical Rainforests

2.2.10 Deforestation - Statistical Skills

2.3 Hot Deserts

2.3.1 Overview of Hot Deserts

2.3.2 Biodiversity & Adaptation to Hot Deserts

2.3.3 Case Study: Sahara Desert

2.3.4 Desertification

2.3.5 Case Study: Thar Desert

2.3.6 End of Topic Test - Hot Deserts

2.3.7 Exam-Style Questions - Hot Deserts

2.4 Tundra & Polar Environments

2.4.1 Overview of Cold Environments

2.4.2 Adaptations in Cold Environments

2.4.3 Biodiversity in Cold Environments

2.4.4 Case Study: Alaska

2.4.5 Sustainable Management

2.4.6 Case Study: Svalbard

2.4.7 End of Topic Test - Tundra & Polar Environments

2.4.8 Exam-Style Questions - Cold Environments

3 Physical Landscapes in the UK

3.1 The UK Physical Landscape

3.1.1 The UK Physical Landscape

3.2 Coastal Landscapes in the UK

3.2.1 Types of Wave

3.2.2 Weathering & Mass Movement

3.2.3 Processes of Erosion & Wave-Cut Platforms

3.2.4 Headlands, Bays, Caves, Arches & Stacks

3.2.5 Transportation

3.2.6 Deposition

3.2.7 Spits, Bars & Sand Dunes

3.2.8 Case Study: Landforms on the Dorset Coast

3.2.9 Types of Coastal Management 1

3.2.10 Types of Coastal Management 2

3.2.11 Coastal Management Case Study - Holderness

3.2.12 Coastal Management Case Study: Swanage

3.2.13 Coastal Management Case Study - Lyme Regis

3.2.14 End of Topic Test - Coastal Landscapes in the UK

3.2.15 Exam-Style Questions - Coasts

3.3 River Landscapes in the UK

3.3.1 The River Valley

3.3.2 River Valley Case Study - River Tees

3.3.3 Erosion

3.3.4 Transportation & Deposition

3.3.5 Waterfalls, Gorges & Interlocking Spurs

3.3.6 Meanders & Oxbow Lakes

3.3.7 Floodplains & Levees

3.3.8 Estuaries

3.3.9 Case Study: The River Clyde

3.3.10 River Management

3.3.11 Hard & Soft Flood Defences

3.3.12 River Management Case Study - Boscastle

3.3.13 River Management Case Study - Banbury

3.3.14 End of Topic Test - River Landscapes in the UK

3.3.15 Exam-Style Questions - Rivers

3.4 Glacial Landscapes in the UK

3.4.1 Erosion

3.4.2 Landforms Caused by Erosion

3.4.3 Landforms Caused by Transportation & Deposition

3.4.4 Snowdonia

3.4.5 Land Use in Glaciated Areas

3.4.6 Tourism in Glacial Landscapes

3.4.7 Case Study - Lake District

3.4.8 End of Topic Test - Glacial Landscapes in the UK

3.4.9 Exam-Style Questions - Glacial Landscapes

4 Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1 Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.1 Urbanisation

4.1.2 Urbanisation Case Study: Lagos

4.1.3 Urbanisation Case Study: Rio de Janeiro

4.1.4 UK Cities

4.1.5 Case Study: Urban Regen Projects - Manchester

4.1.6 Case Study: Urban Change in Liverpool

4.1.7 Case Study: Urban Change in Bristol

4.1.8 Sustainable Urban Life

4.1.9 End of Topic Test - Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.10 Exam-Style Questions - Urban Issues & Challenges

4.1.11 Urban Issues -Statistical Skills

5 The Changing Economic World

5.1 The Changing Economic World

5.1.1 Measuring Development

5.1.2 Classifying Countries Based on Wealth

5.1.3 The Demographic Transition Model

5.1.4 Physical & Historical Causes of Uneven Development

5.1.5 Economic Causes of Uneven Development

5.1.6 How Can We Reduce the Global Development Gap?

5.1.7 Case Study: Tourism in Kenya

5.1.8 Case Study: Tourism in Jamaica

5.1.9 Case Study: Economic Development in India

5.1.10 Case Study: Aid & Development in India

5.1.11 Case Study: Economic Development in Nigeria

5.1.12 Case Study: Aid & Development in Nigeria

5.1.13 Economic Development in the UK

5.1.14 Economic Development UK: Industry & Rural

5.1.15 Economic Development UK: Transport & North-South

5.1.16 Economic Development UK: Regional & Global

5.1.17 End of Topic Test - The Changing Economic World

5.1.18 Exam-Style Questions - The Changing Economic World

5.1.19 Changing Economic World - Statistical Skills

6 The Challenge of Resource Management

6.1 Resource Management

6.1.1 Global Distribution of Resources

6.1.2 Food in the UK

6.1.3 Water in the UK 1

6.1.4 Water in the UK 2

6.1.5 Energy in the UK

6.1.6 Resource Management - Statistical Skills

6.2.1 Areas of Food Surplus & Food Deficit

6.2.2 Food Supply & Food Insecurity

6.2.3 Increasing Food Supply

6.2.4 Case Study: Thanet Earth

6.2.5 Creating a Sustainable Food Supply

6.2.6 Case Study: Agroforestry in Mali

6.2.7 End of Topic Test - Food

6.2.8 Exam-Style Questions - Food

6.2.9 Food - Statistical Skills

6.3.1 The Global Demand for Water

6.3.2 What Affects the Availability of Water?

6.3.3 Increasing Water Supplies

6.3.4 Case Study: Water Transfer in China

6.3.5 Sustainable Water Supply

6.3.6 Case Study: Kenya's Sand Dams

6.3.7 Case Study: Lesotho Highland Water Project

6.3.8 Case Study: Wakel River Basin Project

6.3.9 Exam-Style Questions - Water

6.3.10 Water - Statistical Skills

6.4.1 Global Demand for Energy

6.4.2 Factors Affecting Energy Supply

6.4.3 Increasing Energy Supply: Renewables

6.4.4 Increasing Energy Supply: Non-Renewables

6.4.5 Carbon Footprints & Energy Conservation

6.4.6 Case Study: Rice Husks in Bihar

6.4.7 Exam-Style Questions - Energy

6.4.8 Energy - Statistical Skills

Jump to other topics

Unlock your full potential with GoStudent tutoring

Affordable 1:1 tutoring from the comfort of your home

Tutors are matched to your specific learning needs

30+ school subjects covered

Deforestation

Sustainable Management of Rainforests

Tropical rainforest case study

Case study of a tropical rainforest setting to illustrate and analyse key themes in water and carbon cycles and their relationship to environmental change and human activity.

Amazon Forest The Amazon is the largest tropical rainforest on Earth. It sits within the Amazon River basin, covers some 40% of the South American continent and as you can see on the map below includes parts of eight South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname. The actual word “Amazon” comes from river. Amazing Amazon facts; • It is home to 1000 species of bird and 60,000 species of plants • 10 million species of insects live in the Amazon • It is home to 20 million people, who use the wood, cut down trees for farms and for cattle. • It covers 2.1 million square miles of land • The Amazon is home to almost 20% of species on Earth • The UK and Ireland would fit into the Amazon 17 times! The Amazon caught the public’s attention in the 1980s when a series of shocking news reports said that an area of rainforest the size of Belgium was being cut down and subsequently burnt every year. This deforestation has continued to the present day according to the Sao Paulo Space Research Centre. Current statistics suggest that we have lost 20% of Amazon rainforest. Their satellite data is also showing increased deforestation in parts of the Amazon.

Water The water cycle is very active within the Amazon rainforest and it interlinks the lithosphere, atmosphere and biosphere.  The basin is drained by the Amazon River and its tributaries.  The average discharge of water into the Atlantic Ocean by the Amazon is approximately 175,000 m 3 per second, or between 1/5th and 1/6th of the total discharge into the oceans of all of the world's rivers. 3 The Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon, is the second largest river in the world in terms of water flow, and is 100 meters deep and 14 kilometers wide near its mouth at Manaus, Brazil. Rainfall across the Amazon is very high.  Average rainfall across the whole Amazon basin is approximately 2300 mm annually. In some areas of the northwest portion of the Amazon basin, yearly rainfall can exceed 6000 mm. 3 Only around 1/3 of the rain that falls in the Amazon basin is discharged into the Atlantic Ocean. It is thought that; 1. Up to half of the rainfall in some areas may never reach the ground, being intercepted by the forest and re-evaporated into the atmosphere. 2. Additional evaporation occurs from ground and river surfaces, or is released into the atmosphere by transpiration from plant leaves (in which plants release water from their leaves during photosynthesis) 3. This moisture contributes to the formation of rain clouds, which release the water back onto the rainforest. In the Amazon, 50-80 percent of moisture remains in the ecosystem’s water cycle. 4

This means that much of the rainfall re-enters the water cycling system of the Amazon, and a given molecule of water may be "re-cycled" many times between the time that it leaves the surface of the Atlantic Ocean and is carried by the prevailing westerly winds into the Amazon basin, to the time that it is carried back to the ocean by the Amazon River. 4 It is thought that the water cycle of the Amazon has global effects.  The moisture created by rainforests travels around the world. Moisture created in the Amazon ends up falling as rain as far away as Texas, and forests in Southeast Asia influence rain patterns in south eastern Europe and China. 4 When forests are cut down, less moisture goes into the atmosphere and rainfall declines, sometimes leading to drought. These have been made worse by deforestation. 4 Change to the water and carbon cycles in the Amazon The main change to the Amazon rainforest is deforestation.  Deforestation in the Amazon is generally the result of land clearances for; 1. Agriculture (to grow crops like Soya or Palm oil) or for pasture land for cattle grazing 2. Logging – This involves cutting down trees for sale as timber or pulp.  The timber is used to build homes, furniture, etc. and the pulp is used to make paper and paper products.  Logging can be either selective or clear cutting. Selective logging is selective because loggers choose only wood that is highly valued, such as mahogany. Clear-cutting is not selective.  Loggers are interested in all types of wood and therefore cut all of the trees down, thus clearing the forest, hence the name- clear-cutting. 3. Road building – trees are also clear for roads.  Roads are an essential way for the Brazilian government to allow development of the Amazon rainforest.  However, unless they are paved many of the roads are unusable during the wettest periods of the year.  The Trans Amazonian Highway has already opened up large parts of the forest and now a new road is going to be paved, the BR163 is a road that runs 1700km from Cuiaba to Santarem. The government planned to tarmac it making it a superhighway. This would make the untouched forest along the route more accessible and under threat from development. 4. Mineral extraction – forests are also cleared to make way for huge mines. The Brazilian part of the Amazon has mines that extract iron, manganese, nickel, tin, bauxite, beryllium, copper, lead, tungsten, zinc and gold! 5. Energy developmen t – This has focussed mainly on using Hydro Electric Power, and there are 150 new dams planned for the Amazon alone.  The dams create electricity as water is passed through huge pipes within them, where it turns a turbine which helps to generate the electricity.  The power in the Amazon is often used for mining.  Dams displace many people and the reservoirs they create flood large area of land, which would previously have been forest.  They also alter the hydrological cycle and trap huge quantities of sediment behind them. The huge Belo Monte dam started operating in April 2016 and will generate over 11,000 Mw of power.  A new scheme the 8,000-megawatt São Luiz do Tapajós dam has been held up because of the concerns over the impacts on the local Munduruku people. 6. Settlement & population growth – populations are growing within the Amazon forest and along with them settlements.  Many people are migrating to the forest looking for work associated with the natural wealth of this environment. Settlements like Parauapebas, an iron ore mining town, have grown rapidly, destroying forest and replacing it with a swath of shanty towns. The population has grown from 154,000 in 2010 to 220,000 in 2012. The Brazilian Amazon’s population grew by a massive 23% between 2000 and 2010, 11% above the national average.

The WWF estimates that 27 per cent, more than a quarter, of the Amazon biome will be without trees by 2030 if the current rate of deforestation continues. They also state that Forest losses in the Amazon biome averaged 1.4 million hectares per year between 2001 and 2012, resulting in a total loss of 17.7 million hectares, mostly in Brazil, Peru and Bolivia.  12

The impacts of deforestation Atmospheric impacts Deforestation causes important changes in the energy and water balance of the Amazon. Pasturelands and croplands (e.g. soya beans and corn) have a higher albedo and decreased water demand, evapotranspiration and canopy interception compared with the forests they replace. 9 Lathuillière et al. 10 found that forests in the state of Mato Grosso; • Contributed about 50 km 3 per year of evapotranspiration to the atmosphere in the year 2000. • Deforestation reduced that forest flux rate by approximately 1 km 3 per year throughout the decade. • As a result, by 2009, forests were contributing about 40 km 3 per year of evapotranspiration in Mato Grosso.

Differences such as these can affect atmospheric circulation and rainfall in proportion to the scale of deforestation The agriculture that replaces forest cover also decreases precipitation. In Rondônia, Brazil, one of the most heavily deforested areas of Brazil, daily rainfall data suggest that deforestation since the 1970s has caused an 18-day delay in the onset of the rainy season. 11 SSE Amazon also has many wild fires, which are closely associated with deforestation, forest fragmentation and drought intensity. According to Coe et al (2015) “ the increased atmospheric aerosol loads produced by fires have been shown to decrease droplet size, increase cloud height and cloud lifetime and inhibit rainfall, particularly in the dry season in the SSE Amazon. Thus, fires and drought may create a positive feedback in the SSE Amazon such that drought is more severe with continued deforestation and climate change .” 9

The impacts of climate change on the Amazon According to the WWF: • Some Amazon species capable of moving fast enough will attempt to find a more suitable environment. Many other species will either be unable to move or will have nowhere to go. • Higher temperatures will impact temperature-dependent species like fish, causing their distribution to change. • Reduced rainfall and increased temperatures may also reduce suitable habitat during dry, warm months and potentially lead to an increase in invasive, exotic species, which then can out-compete native species. • Less rainfall during the dry months could seriously affect many Amazon rivers and other freshwater systems. • The impact of reduced rainfall is a change in nutrient input into streams and rivers, which can greatly affect aquatic organisms. • A more variable climate and more extreme events will also likely mean that Amazon fish populations will more often experience hot temperatures and potentially lethal environmental conditions. • Flooding associated with sea-level rise will have substantial impacts on lowland areas such as the Amazon River delta. The rate of sea-level rise over the last 100 years has been 1.0-2.5 mm per year, and this rate could rise to 5 mm per year. • Sea-level rise, increased temperature, changes in rainfall and runoff will likely cause major changes in species habitats such as mangrove ecosystems. 15 Impacts of deforestation on soils Removing trees deprives the forest of portions of its canopy, which blocks the sun’s rays during the day, and holds in heat at night. This disruption leads to more extreme temperature swings that can be harmful to plants and animals. 8 Without protection from sun-blocking tree cover, moist tropical soils quickly dry out. In terms of Carbon, Tropical soils contain a lot of carbon.  The top meter holds 66.9 PgC with around 52% of this carbon pool held in the top 0.3 m of the soil, the layer which is most prone to changes upon land use conversion and deforestation. 14 Deforestation releases much of this carbon through clearance and burning.  For the carbon that remains in the soil, when it rains soil erosion will wash much of the carbon away into rivers after initial deforestation and some will be lost to the atmosphere via decomposition too. 

Impacts of deforestation on Rivers Trees also help continue the water cycle by returning water vapor to the atmosphere. When trees are removed this cycle is severely disrupted and areas can suffer more droughts. There are many consequences of deforestation and climate change for the water cycle in forests; 1. There is increased soil erosion and weathering of rainforest soils as water acts immediately upon them rather than being intercepted. 2. Flash floods are more likely to happen as there is less interception and absorption by the forest cover. 3. Conversely, the interruption of normal water cycling has resulted in more droughts in the forest, increasing the risk of wild fires 4. More soil and silt is being washed into rivers, resulting in changes to waterways and transport 5. Disrupt water supplies to many people in Brazil

References 1 - Malhi, Y. et al. The regional variation of aboveground live biomass in old-growth Amazonian forests. Glob. Chang. Biol. 12, 1107–1138 (2006). 2 - Fernando D.B. Espírito-Santo  et al.  Size and frequency of natural forest disturbances and the Amazon forest carbon balance. Nature Communications volume 5, Article number: 3434 (2014) Accessed 3rd of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms4434#ref4 3 - Project Amazonas. Accessed 3rd of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.projectamazonas.org/amazon-facts  4 - Rhett Butler, 2012. IMPACT OF DEFORESTATION: LOCAL AND NATIONAL CONSEQUENCES.  Accessed 3rd of January 2019 retrieved from https://rainforests.mongabay.com/0902.htm 5 – Mark Kinver. Amazon: 1% of tree species store 50% of region's carbon. 2015. BBC. Accessed 3rd of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-32497537 6 -     Sophie Fauset et al. Hyperdominance in Amazonian forest carbon cycling. Nature Communications volume 6, Article number: 6857 (2015). Accessed 3rd of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.nature.com/articles/ncomms7857 7- Brienen, R.J.W et al. (2015) Long-term decline of the Amazon carbon sink, Nature, h ttps://www.nature.com/articles/nature14283 8 – National Geographic – Deforestation - Learn about the man-made and natural causes of deforestation–and how it's impacting our planet. Accessed 20th of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.nationalgeographic.com/environment/global-warming/deforestation/

9 -  Michael T. Coe, Toby R. Marthews, Marcos Heil Costa, David R. Galbraith, Nora L. Greenglass, Hewlley M. A. Imbuzeiro, Naomi M. Levine, Yadvinder Malhi, Paul R. Moorcroft, Michel Nobre Muza, Thomas L. Powell, Scott R. Saleska, Luis A. Solorzano, and Jingfeng Wang. (2015) Deforestation and climate feedbacks threaten the ecological integrity of south–southeastern Amazonia. 368, Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. Accessed 20th of January 2019 retrieved from http://rstb.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/368/1619/20120155

10 - Lathuillière MJ, Mark S, Johnson MS & Donner SD. (2012). Water use by terrestrial ecosystems: temporal variability in rainforest and agricultural contributions to evapotranspiration in Mato Grosso, Brazil. Environmental research Letters Volume 7 Number 2. http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/7/2/024024/meta

11- Nathalie Butt, Paula Afonso de Oliveira & Marcos Heil Costa (2011). Evidence that deforestation affects the onset of the rainy season in Rondonia, Brazil JGR Atmospheres, Volume 116, Issue D11. https://doi.org/10.1029/2010JD015174

12 – WWF, Amazon Deforestation. Accessed 20th of January 2019 retrieved from http://wwf.panda.org/our_work/forests/deforestation_fronts/deforestation_in_the_amazon/

13 - Berenguer, E., Ferreira, J., Gardner, T. A., Aragão, L. E. O. C., De Camargo, P. B., Cerri, C. E., Durigan, M., Oliveira, R. C. D., Vieira, I. C. G. and Barlow, J. (2014), A large-scale field assessment of carbon stocks in human-modified tropical forests. Global Change Biology, 20: 3713–3726. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/gcb.12627

14 - N.HBatjes, J.ADijkshoorn, (1999). Carbon and nitrogen stocks in the soils of the Amazon Region. Geoderma, Volume 89, Issues 3–4, Pages 273-286. Accessed 20th of January 2019 retrieved from https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S001670619800086X

15 – WWF, Impacts of climate change in the Amazon. Accessed 20th of January 2019 retrieved from http://wwf.panda.org/knowledge_hub/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/climate_change_amazon/amazon_climate_change_impacts/

Written by Rob Gamesby

©2015 Cool Geography

• Copyright Policy
• Privacy & Cookies
• Testimonials
• Feedback & support

Want to create or adapt books like this? Learn more about how Pressbooks supports open publishing practices.

73 Case Study: The Amazon Rainforest

The amazon in context.

Tropical rainforests are often considered to be the “cradles of biodiversity.” Though they cover only about 6% of the Earth’s land surface, they are home to over 50% of global biodiversity. Rain forests also take in massive amounts of carbon dioxide and release oxygen through photosynthesis, which has also given them the nickname “lungs of the planet.” They also store very large amounts of carbon, and so cutting and burning their biomass contributes to global climate change. Many modern medicines are derived from rainforest plants, and several very important food crops originated in the rainforest, including bananas, mangos, chocolate, coffee, and sugar cane.

In order to qualify as a tropical rainforest, an area must receive over 250 centimeters of rainfall each year and have an average temperature above 24 degrees centigrade, as well as never experiencing frosts. The Amazon rainforest in South America is the largest in the world. The second largest is the Congo in central Africa, and other important rainforests can be found in Central America, the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia. Brazil contains about 40% of the world’s remaining tropical rainforest. Its rainforest covers an area of land about 2/3 the size of the continental United States.

There are countless reasons, both anthropocentric and ecocentric, to value rainforests. But they are one of the most threatened types of ecosystems in the world today. It’s somewhat difficult to estimate how quickly rainforests are being cut down, but estimates range from between 50,000 and 170,000 square kilometers per year. Even the most conservative estimates project that if we keep cutting rainforests as we are today, within about 100 years there will be none left.

How does a rainforest work?

Rainforests are incredibly complex ecosystems, but understanding a few basics about their ecology will help us understand why clear-cutting and fragmentation are such destructive activities for rainforest biodiversity.

High biodiversity in tropical rainforests means that the interrelationships between organisms are very complex. A single tree may house more than 40 different ant species, each of which has a different ecological function and may alter the habitat in distinct and important ways. Ecologists debate about whether systems that have high biodiversity are stable and resilient, like a spider web composed of many strong individual strands, or fragile, like a house of cards. Both metaphors are likely appropriate in some cases. One thing we can be certain of is that it is very difficult in a rainforest system, as in most others, to affect just one type of organism. Also, clear cutting one small area may damage hundreds or thousands of established species interactions that reach beyond the cleared area.

Pollination is a challenge for rainforest trees because there are so many different species, unlike forests in the temperate regions that are often dominated by less than a dozen tree species. One solution is for individual trees to grow close together, making pollination simpler, but this can make that species vulnerable to extinction if the one area where it lives is clear cut. Another strategy is to develop a mutualistic relationship with a long-distance pollinator, like a specific bee or hummingbird species. These pollinators develop mental maps of where each tree of a particular species is located and then travel between them on a sort of “trap-line” that allows trees to pollinate each other. One problem is that if a forest is fragmented then these trap-line connections can be disrupted, and so trees can fail to be pollinated and reproduce even if they haven’t been cut.

The quality of rainforest soils is perhaps the most surprising aspect of their ecology. We might expect a lush rainforest to grow from incredibly rich, fertile soils, but actually, the opposite is true. While some rainforest soils that are derived from volcanic ash or from river deposits can be quite fertile, generally rainforest soils are very poor in nutrients and organic matter. Rainforests hold most of their nutrients in their live vegetation, not in the soil. Their soils do not maintain nutrients very well either, which means that existing nutrients quickly “leech” out, being carried away by water as it percolates through the soil. Also, soils in rainforests tend to be acidic, which means that it’s difficult for plants to access even the few existing nutrients. The section on slash and burn agriculture in the previous module describes some of the challenges that farmers face when they attempt to grow crops on tropical rainforest soils, but perhaps the most important lesson is that once a rainforest is cut down and cleared away, very little fertility is left to help a forest regrow.

What is driving deforestation in the Amazon?

Many factors contribute to tropical deforestation, but consider this typical set of circumstances and processes that result in rapid and unsustainable rates of deforestation. This story fits well with the historical experience of Brazil and other countries with territory in the Amazon Basin.

Population growth and poverty encourage poor farmers to clear new areas of rainforest, and their efforts are further exacerbated by government policies that permit landless peasants to establish legal title to land that they have cleared.

At the same time, international lending institutions like the World Bank provide money to the national government for large-scale projects like mining, construction of dams, new roads, and other infrastructure that directly reduces the forest or makes it easier for farmers to access new areas to clear.

The activities most often encouraging new road development are timber harvesting and mining. Loggers cut out the best timber for domestic use or export, and in the process knock over many other less valuable trees. Those trees are eventually cleared and used for wood pulp, or burned, and the area is converted into cattle pastures. After a few years, the vegetation is sufficiently degraded to make it not profitable to raise cattle, and the land is sold to poor farmers seeking out a subsistence living.

Regardless of how poor farmers get their land, they often are only able to gain a few years of decent crop yields before the poor quality of the soil overwhelms their efforts, and then they are forced to move on to another plot of land. Small-scale farmers also hunt for meat in the remaining fragmented forest areas, which reduces the biodiversity in those areas as well.

Another important factor not mentioned in the scenario above is the clearing of rainforest for industrial agriculture plantations of bananas, pineapples, and sugar cane. These crops are primarily grown for export, and so an additional driver to consider is consumer demand for these crops in countries like the United States.

These cycles of land use, which are driven by poverty and population growth as well as government policies, have led to the rapid loss of tropical rainforests. What is lost in many cases is not simply biodiversity, but also valuable renewable resources that could sustain many generations of humans to come. Efforts to protect rainforests and other areas of high biodiversity is the topic of the next section.

Introduction to Geography Copyright © by Petra Tschakert; Karl Zimmerer; Brian King; Seth Baum; and Chongming Wang is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License , except where otherwise noted.

Share This Book

Explainer: Causes and consequences of Amazon fires and deforestation

• Medium Text

WHAT CAUSES THE FIRES?

Why are brazil's fires so bad at this time of year, is climate change affecting amazon forest fires, have brazil's fires been worse than usual in recent years, how much worse is forest loss since 2019.

WILL THIS YEAR'S FIRE SEASON BE DIFFERENT?

Are the amazon fires contributing to climate change.

The Reuters Daily Briefing newsletter provides all the news you need to start your day. Sign up here.

Reporting by Jake Spring in Sao Paulo and Gloria Dickie in London; Editing by Katy Daigle

Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles. New Tab , opens new tab

Thomson Reuters

Jake Spring reports primarily on forests, climate diplomacy, carbon markets and climate science. Based in Brazil, his investigative reporting on destruction of the Amazon rainforest under ex-President Jair Bolsonaro won 2021 Best Reporting in Latin America from the Overseas Press Club of America (https://opcofamerica.org/Awardarchive/the-robert-spiers-benjamin-award-2021/). His beat reporting on Brazil’s environmental destruction won a Covering Climate Now award and was honored by the Society of Environmental Journalists. He joined Reuters in 2014 in China, where he previously worked as editor-in-chief of China Economic Review. He is fluent in Mandarin Chinese and Brazilian Portuguese.

Gloria Dickie reports on climate and environmental issues for Reuters. She is based in London. Her interests include biodiversity loss, Arctic science, the cryosphere, international climate diplomacy, climate change and public health, and human-wildlife conflict. She previously worked as a freelance environmental journalist for 7 years, writing for publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, Scientific American, and Wired magazine. Dickie was a 2022 finalist for the Livingston Awards for Young Journalists in the international reporting category for her climate reporting from Svalbard. She is also an author at W.W. Norton.

World Chevron

Ukraine downs Russian strategic bomber after airstrike kills eight, Kyiv says

Ukraine shot down a Russian strategic bomber 300 km (185 miles) from its border on Friday after the warplane took part in an airstrike that killed at least eight people, including two children, in the central Dnipropetrovsk region, Kyiv said.

• Deforestation
• Going Green
• Reforestation
• Privacy Policy

Deforestation: Case Studies

Deforestation is putting our planet at risk, as the following case studies exemplify. It is responsible for at least 10 per cent of global greenhouse gas emissions 1 and wipes out 137 species of plants, animals and insects every day 2 . The deplorable practice degenerates soil, losing half of the world’s topsoil over the past 150 years. 3 Deforestation also leads to drought by reducing the amount of water in the atmosphere. 4

Since the 1950s, deforestation has accelerated significantly, particularly in the tropics. 5 This is primarily due to rapid population growth and a resultant increase in demand for food and resources. 6 Agriculture drives about 80 per cent of deforestation today, as land is cleared for livestock, growing animal feed or other crops. 7 The below deforestation case studies of Brazil’s Amazon rainforest and the Congo Basin provide further insights into modern deforestation. 

Deforestation case study: Brazil

Nearly two-thirds of the Amazon rainforest – the largest rainforest in the world – is within Brazil’s national borders. 8 Any examination of deforestation case studies would be incomplete without considering tree felling in Brazil. 

History of deforestation in Brazil

Humans first discovered the Amazon rainforest about 13,000 years ago. But, it was the arrival of Europeans in the late 15th century that spurred the conversion of the forest into farmland. Nevertheless, the sheer size of the Amazon meant that the rainforest remained largely intact until the early 20th century. It was in the latter half of the 20th century that things began to change. 9

Industrial activities and large-scale agriculture began to eat away the southern and eastern fringes of the Amazon, from the 1950s onwards. 10 Deforestation in Brazil received a significant boost in 1964 when a military dictatorship took power and declared the jungle a security risk. 11 By the 1970s, the government was running television ads encouraging land conversion, provoking millions to migrate north into the forest. 12 Settlements replaced trees, and infrastructure began to develop. Wealthy tycoons subsequently bought the land for cattle ranches or vast fields of soy. 13

By the turn of the 21st century, more than 75 per cent of deforestation in the Amazon was for cattle ranching. But, environmentalists and Indigenous groups drew international attention to the devastation caused and succeeded in curtailing it by 2004. Between 2004 and the early 2010s, annual forest cover loss in Brazil reduced by about 80 per cent. The decline is attributed to “increased law enforcement, satellite monitoring, pressure from environmentalists, private and public sector initiatives, new protected areas, and macroeconomic trends”. 14  

Brazil’s deforestation of the Amazon rainforest since 2010

Unfortunately, however, efforts to curtail deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon have stalled since 2012. 15 Tree felling and land conversion have been trending upwards ever since. The economic incentive for chopping the rainforest down has overcome the environmental benefits of leaving it standing. 16 Political movements and lax government legislation have leveraged this to their advantage. President Jair Bolsonaro won the 2018 election with a promise to open up the Amazon to business. 17 Since his inauguration, the rate of deforestation has leapt by as much as 92 per cent. 18

However, there is still hope for the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro’s principal international ally was US President Trump. Now that environmentally-conscious Joe Biden has replaced him in the White House, international pressure regarding deforestation will increase heavily. 19 Biden has made this clear with a promise of USD $20 billion to protect the Amazon. 20

The impact of continued deforestation in Brazil

For its three million plant and animal species and one million Indigenous inhabitants, it is imperative that Amazonian deforestation is massively and immediately reduced. 21 As much as 17 per cent of the Amazon has been lost already. 22 If this proportion increases to over 20 per cent, a tipping point will be reached. 23 This will irreversibly break the water cycle, and at least half of the remaining forest will become savannah. 24

Impact on climate change

Losing the Amazon would also mean losing the fight against climate change. Despite the rampant deforestation in recent years, the remaining Amazon rainforest still absorbs between 5 to 10 per cent of all human CO2 emissions. 25 Cutting trees down increases anthropogenic emissions. When felled, burned or left to rot, trees release sequestered carbon. 26 A combination of reducing greenhouse gas emissions and preserving existing forests is crucial to preventing dangerous levels of global warming. 27  

Deforestation case study: The Congo Basin

The Congo Basin is the second-largest rainforest in the world. 28 It has been described as the ‘second lungs’ of the Earth because of how much carbon dioxide it absorbs and how much oxygen it produces. 29 But, just as the world’s first lungs – the Amazon – is being destroyed by humans, the Congo’s rainforest is also suffering heavy casualties. 30

60 per cent of the Congo Basin is located within the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC). 31 The DRC is one of the world’s largest and poorest countries, though it has immense economic resources. 32 Natural resources have fuelled an ongoing war that has affected all the neighbouring countries and claimed as many as six million lives. 33 The resultant instability combined with corruption and poor governance have led to an ever-increasing rate of deforestation within the DRC’s borders. 34

Deforestation in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC)

Compared to the Amazon and Southeast Asia, deforestation in the Congo Basin has been low over the past few decades. 35 Nevertheless, great swathes of primary forest have been lost. Between 2000 and 2014, an area of forest larger than Bangladesh was destroyed. 36 From 2015 until 2019, 6.37 million hectares of tree cover was razed. 37 In 2019 alone, 475,000 hectares of primary forest disappeared, placing the DRC second only to Brazil for total deforestation that year. 38 Should the current rate of deforestation continue, all primary forest in the Congo Basin will be gone by the end of the century. 39

Drivers of deforestation in the DRC’s Congo Basin

Over the past 20 years, the biggest drivers of deforestation in the DRC has been small-scale subsistence agriculture. Clearing trees for charcoal and fuelwood, urban expansion and mining have also contributed to deforestation. Industrial logging is the most common cause of forest degradation. It opens up deeper areas of the forest to commercial hunting. There has been at least a 60 per cent drop in the region’s forest elephant populations over the past decade due to hunting and poaching. 40  

Between 2000 and 2014, small-scale farming contributed to about 90 per cent of the DRC’s deforestation. This trend has not changed in recent years. The majority of small-scale forest clearing is conducted with simple axes by people with no other livelihood options. The region’s political instability and ongoing conflict are therefore inciting the unsustainable rate of deforestation within the Congo Basin. 41

In future, however, industrial logging and land conversion to large-scale agriculture will pose the greatest threats to the Congo rainforest. 42 There are fears that demand for palm oil, rubber and sugar production will promote a massive increase in deforestation. 43 The DRC’s population is also predicted to grow to almost 200 million people by 2050. 44 This increase will threaten the remaining rainforest further, as they try to earn a living in a country deprived of opportunities. 45

The impact of deforestation in the Congo Basin

80 million people depend upon the Congo Basin for their existence. It provides food, charcoal, firewood, medicinal plants, and materials for building and other purposes. But, this rainforest also indirectly supports people across the whole of sub-Saharan Africa. Like all forests, it is instrumental in regulating rainfall, which can affect precipitation hundreds of miles away. The Congo Basin is a primary source of rainfall for the Sahel region, doubling the amount of rainfall in the air that passes over it. 46

The importance of the Congo Basin’s ability to increase precipitation cannot be understated. Areas such as the Horn of Africa are becoming increasingly dry. Drought in Ethiopia and Somalia has put millions of people on emergency food and water rations in recent years. Destroying the DRC’s rainforest would create the largest humanitarian crisis on Earth. 47  

It would also be devastating for biodiversity. The Congo Basin shelters some 10,000 animal species and more than 600 tree species. 48 They play a hugely important role in the forest, which has consequences for the entire planet. For instance, elephants, gorillas, and other large herbivores keep the density of small trees very low through predation. 49 This results in a high density of tall trees in the Congo rainforest. 50 Larger trees store more carbon and therefore help to prevent global warming by removing this greenhouse gas from the atmosphere. 51  

Preserve our forests

Preserving the Amazon and Congo Basin rainforests is vital for tackling climate change, as these deforestation case studies demonstrate. We must prioritise protecting and enhancing our existing trees if we are to limit the global temperature increase to 1.5°C, as recommended by the IPCC. 52

• Rainforest Alliance. (2018). What is the Relationship Between Deforestation And Climate Change? [online] Available at: https://www.rainforest-alliance.org/articles/relationship-between-deforestation-climate-change.
• www.worldanimalfoundation.com. (n.d.). Deforestation: Clearing The Path For Wildlife Extinctions. [online] Available at: https://www.worldanimalfoundation.com/advocate/wild-earth/params/post/1278141/deforestation-clearing-the-path-for-wildlife-extinctions#:~:text=Seventy%20percent%20of%20the%20Earth.
• World Wildlife Fund. (2000). Soil Erosion and Degradation | Threats | WWF. [online] Available at: https://www.worldwildlife.org/threats/soil-erosion-and-degradation.
• Butler, R.A. (2001). The impact of deforestation. [online] Mongabay. Available at: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/09-consequences-of-deforestation.html.
• The Classroom | Empowering Students in Their College Journey. (2009). The History of Deforestation. [online] Available at: https://www.theclassroom.com/the-history-of-deforestation-13636286.html.
• Greenpeace USA. (n.d.). Agribusiness & Deforestation. [online] Available at: https://www.greenpeace.org/usa/forests/issues/agribusiness/.
• Yale.edu. (2015). The Amazon Basin Forest | Global Forest Atlas. [online] Available at: https://globalforestatlas.yale.edu/region/amazon.
• Time. (2019). The Amazon Rain Forest Is Nearly Gone. We Went to the Front Lines to See If It Could Be Saved. [online] Available at: https://time.com/amazon-rainforest-disappearing/.
• Butler, R. (2020). Amazon Destruction. [online] Mongabay.com. Available at: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/amazon_destruction.html.
• the Guardian. (2020). Amazon deforestation surges to 12-year high under Bolsonaro. [online] Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2020/dec/01/amazon-deforestation-surges-to-12-year-high-under-bolsonaro.
• Earth Innovation Institute. (2020). Joe Biden offers $20 billion to protect Amazon forests. [online] Available at: https://earthinnovation.org/2020/03/joe-biden-offers-20-billion-to-protect-amazon-forests/.
• Brazil’s Amazon: Deforestation “surges to 12-year high.” (2020). BBC News. [online] 30 Nov. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-latin-america-55130304.
• Carbon Brief. (2020). Guest post: Could climate change and deforestation spark Amazon “dieback”? [online] Available at: https://www.carbonbrief.org/guest-post-could-climate-change-and-deforestation-spark-amazon-dieback.
• Union of Concerned Scientists (2012). Tropical Deforestation and Global Warming | Union of Concerned Scientists. [online] www.ucsusa.org. Available at: https://www.ucsusa.org/resources/tropical-deforestation-and-global-warming#:~:text=When%20trees%20are%20cut%20down.
• Milman, O. (2018). Scientists say halting deforestation “just as urgent” as reducing emissions. [online] the Guardian. Available at: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/oct/04/climate-change-deforestation-global-warming-report.
• Bergen, M. (2019). Congo Basin Deforestation Threatens Food and Water Supplies Throughout Africa. [online] World Resources Institute. Available at: https://www.wri.org/blog/2019/07/congo-basin-deforestation-threatens-food-and-water-supplies-throughout-africa.
• www.esa.int. (n.d.). Earth from Space: “Second lungs of the Earth.” [online] Available at: https://www.esa.int/Applications/Observing_the_Earth/Earth_from_Space_Second_lungs_of_the_Earth [Accessed 26 Feb. 2021].
• Erickson-Davis, M. (2018). Congo Basin rainforest may be gone by 2100, study finds. [online] Mongabay Environmental News. Available at: https://news.mongabay.com/2018/11/congo-basin-rainforest-may-be-gone-by-2100-study-finds/.
• Mongabay Environmental News. (2020). Poor governance fuels “horrible dynamic” of deforestation in DRC. [online] Available at: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/poor-governance-fuels-horrible-dynamic-of-deforestation-in-drc/ [Accessed 26 Feb. 2021].
• DR Congo country profile. (2019). BBC News. [online] 10 Jan. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-africa-13283212.
• Butler, R.A. (2001). Congo Deforestation. [online] Mongabay. Available at: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/congo/deforestation.html.
• Mongabay Environmental News. (2020). Poor governance fuels “horrible dynamic” of deforestation in DRC. [online] Available at: https://news.mongabay.com/2020/12/poor-governance-fuels-horrible-dynamic-of-deforestation-in-drc/.
• Butler, R. (2020). The Congo Rainforest. [online] Mongabay.com. Available at: https://rainforests.mongabay.com/congo/.
• Editor, B.W., Environment (n.d.). Large trees are carbon-storing giants. www.thetimes.co.uk. [online] Available at: https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/large-trees-are-more-valuable-carbon-stores-than-was-thought-k8hnggzs8#:~:text=The%20world [Accessed 26 Feb. 2021].
• IPCC (2018). Summary for Policymakers — Global Warming of 1.5 oC. [online] Ipcc.ch. Available at: https://www.ipcc.ch/sr15/chapter/spm/.

Related posts:

• Top 10 Facts about Deforestation
• Deforestation Debate
• When a Tree Falls It Makes More Than a Sound
• What is Deforestation?

Related Posts

10 Facts About Deforestation in 2021

The following facts about deforestation in 2021 show that our planet is in a precarious position. We must leave our...

Where Is Deforestation Happening in 2021?

To combat climate change, it is important to know where deforestation is happening in 2021. Deforestation currently accounts for at...

The History of Deforestation: The Past and Origins

In many ways, the history of deforestation is the same as the history of agriculture. When humans began to farm...

The Economic Impact of Deforestation

Deforestation is the permanent removal of forests. Agriculture usually replaces the woodland.Youmatter (2020). Deforestation - What Is It? What Are...

Silviculture and Timber Production

Over the past decade, millions of trees have been dying at a frightening pace across the US and Canada. Some...

How Does Planting Trees Affect Climate Change?

While climate change can be a politically controversial topic, tree planting rarely is. Planting trees and climate change are directly...

10 Causes of Deforestation: The Roots of Forest Degradation

How Much CO2 Does a Tree Absorb?

The Effect of Oil Sands Tailings Ponds on Climate Change

• Privacy & Policy

© 2020 Climate Transform

Privacy Overview

Site Search

• How to Search
• Advisory Group
• Editorial Board
• OEC Fellows
• History and Funding
• Using OEC Materials
• Collections
• Research Ethics Resources
• Ethics Projects
• Communities of Practice
• Get Involved
• Submit Content
• Open Access Membership
• Become a Partner

Case: Conservation in the Amazon

In this case, Armando, a Brazilian Federal Senator with a BS and MS in Biology, must confront ethical dilemmas concerning the Amazon forest. Topics for consideration include: 1) the biodiversity and ecosystem services associated with the forest, 2) the social and economic issues surrounding deforestation, and the 3) options available to Armando as he makes his recommendation on how to use the US funds. Finally, we will explore the role of Maria as a science advisor and address her responsibilities, as well as her mistake in addressing the press.

This biodiversity case is part of a larger collection of Life and Environmental Science ethics education resource sets on ethics of emerging biotechnologies, big data in the life sciences, human enhancement, and biodiversity. Doctoral students from Arizona State University’s Center for Biology and Society developed the resources under the direction of Karin Ellison and Joseph Herkert between 2014 and 2019.

Armando Santos grew up the son of rubber tappers in the city of Tailândia, Brazil, in the northern state of Pará. Throughout his childhood, Armando would often accompany his parents on their trips into the Amazon forest to harvest latex from the trees (a sustainable, legal process). His rubber tapper parents often directly competed with illegal loggers, slash-and-burn farmers, and cattle ranchers. Logging, farming and ranching typically destroy mature, “mother-trees” that rubber tappers harvest from. Entrenched in the Tailândia community, however, Armando did not blame his fellow citizens for the Amazon’s destruction; he knew that many people log the forest out of financial or personal desperation. Most citizens of Tailândia rely on soybean agriculture, cattle ranching, and logging for their income.

Armando became interested in how people and the forest could co-exist, and he went on to complete undergraduate and masters degrees in biology at the local university, with a special focus on coupled social and ecological systems. Throughout his education, he became more aware of the political and economic implications of forest management and realized that as a biologist he wouldn’t have the type of political power he wanted to affect the ways in which the government manages the Amazon. Thus, Armando ventured into a political career. Having worked through positions in local and regional government over the last 15 years, today Armando represents the state of Pará in the Federal Senate, the upper house of the national congress. Armando is a proud member of the Worker’s Party, a left of center party with a social and economic platform that resonates with the citizens of Pará who struggle to live in harsh working and financial conditions.

In the upcoming Federal Senate session, senators will vote on a bill to appropriate funds from an investment by the US of around $750 million (USD) to be distributed over 10 years as a part of the Amazon Fund organized by the Brazilian Government in 2008. As a well-liked senator from Pará with considerable expertise in forest ecology and management, Armando will be expected to weigh in on the bill. Armando’s many responsibilities as a senator necessitate hiring advisors of different expertise to aid him in decision-making. Maria Duarte, Ph.D., is the new science advisor to Armando. Though raised in the large capital city of Pará, Belém, Maria completed undergraduate and graduate schooling in the US, studying the ecology of tropical forests. Regarding the upcoming Senate session, Maria argues that Armando should recommend putting the US funds towards creating a new swath of protected area in Pará resembling a US National Park. This, she argues, is the best and most ethical way to ensure the ecosystem remains intact for generations to come and to demonstrate to the US that funds are being used in an effective and discernible manner. Should resistance to this idea arise in the Senate, she notes that Armando could emphasize the global and regional ecosystem services offered by the forest to justify protection, though she feels the intrinsic value of the ecosystem is justification enough.

Before presenting her policy recommendations to Armando, Maria takes the liberty of replying to an inquiry from the Pará newspaper, O Liberal . Asked about Armando’s response to the US investment, Maria states that she is recommending that he heed her suggestions: If so, “Pará will soon be home to a new, US-funded, US-inspired national park.” O Liberal , however, misquotes Maria and reports that Armando has already agreed to Maria’s plan for the US investment. Upset that Maria spoke to the press without permission, Armando reminds her that he is not obligated to follow her advice. Yet Armando understands that the press can occasionally take statements out of context to the point of miscommunication, so he allows the mistake so long as Maria promises to leave news communication to the press secretary in the future.

Though he loves the forest, Armando explains to Maria that there is more to the Amazon than the trees. The social system in Pará is deeply tied to the ecological system. Armando believes it is unethical to exclude humans from the forest and is doubtful a protected area restricting human use will be popular with his constituents or his Senate colleagues.

First, monitoring protected areas in the region is difficult. More money will buy more personnel, but Armando feels it is unlikely to halt violent encounters among police, illegal loggers, rubber tappers, and farmers. Second, Armando’s constituents elected him on the Worker Party platform, hopeful that he could improve infrastructure and broaden economic opportunities. Investment in a protected area would be unpopular with citizens of Pará who rely on developing and using the forest for income. Armando is up for re-election at the end of the year. If he disappoints his constituents, he could lose his Senate seat. Finally, both his constituents and his Senate colleagues will be sensitive to attempted replication of a US National Park in Pará. Brazilians in general are wary of foreign influence, and particularly look out for foreign powers that threaten to “annex the Amazon forest unless the country can find something useful to do with it” (Economist 2009). Efforts by the international community to conserve the Amazon in Brazil are met with suspicion and frustration: “Do you care about us, or just our forest?” (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009, 61).

Armando has one month to deliberate with Maria and the rest of his team on a plan for the US investment. He will present his suggestions in front of the Federal Senate, a nationally televised event.

Discussion Questions:

• Briefly summarize the competing interests involved in conservation of biodiversity in the Brazilian Amazon Rain Forest, categorized by scale (local, regional, global).
• How would you describe the ethical stance of Armando Santos? Do you agree or disagree with his views? Why or why not? Summarize the competing interests he must manage in his decision. Which do you feel he should prioritize? Why?
• How would you describe the ethical stance of Maria Duarte? Do you agree or disagree with her views? Why or why not? Provide a critique of Maria’s argument to preserve the Amazon in Pará as a national park.
• What is Maria’s job as a science advisor? Is Maria performing her job as science advisor in a responsible manner?
• Was it ethical for Maria to talk with the press without permission? To what extent does Maria bare responsibility for the reporter’s error? Should Armando discipline her? Is there a positive lesson Armando can teach Maria about dealing with the press?
• How can the US investment be appropriated to avoid tension in foreign relations?
• How could the US funds be used to serve both economic and ecological interests?

Bibliography:

Börner, J., S. Wunder, S. Wertz- Kanounnikoff, M. Rügnitz Tito, L. Pereira, and N. Nascimento. 2010. “Direct conservation payments in the Brazilian Amazon: Scope and equity implications.” Ecological Economics 69: 1272-1282.

Eltahir, E. A., and R. L. Bras. 1994. “Precipitation recycling in the Amazon basin.” Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society 120: 861-880.

Garcia-Navarro, L. 2015. “Deep in the Amazon, an Unseen Battle Over the Most Valuable Trees.” NPR , November 4.

Gibbs, H. K, L. Rausch, J. Munger, I. Schelly, D. C. Morton, P. Noojipady, B. Soares-Filho, P. Barreto, L. Micol, and N. F. Walker. 2015. “Brazil’s Soy Moratorium.” Science 347: 377-378.

Greenpeace. 2016. “The Amazon Soya Moratorium.” Accessed July 25. http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/code/2014/amazon/index.html

IPCC. 2014.  Climate Change 2014 Synthesis Report. Geneva, Switzerland.

Lewinsohn, T. M., and P. I. Prado. 2005. “How Many Species are there in Brazil?” Conservation Biology 19: 619-624.

Malhi, Y., J. T. Roberts, R. A. Betts, T. J. Killeen, W. Li, and C. A. Nobre. 2008. “Climate Change, Deforestation, and the Fate of the Amazon.” Science 319: 169-172.

Myers, N., R. A. Mittermeier, C. G. Mittermeier, G. A. B. da Fonseca, and J. Kent. 2000. “Biodiversity Hotspots for Conservation Priorities.” Nature 403: 853-858.

Nordhaus, T., and M. Shellenberger. 2009. “The Forest for the Trees.” In Break Through: Why We Can’t Leave Saving the Planet to Environmentalists, 41-65 . Boston, MA: Mariner Books. 

Pielke, Jr., R. A. 2007. The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Soares-Filho, B. S., D. C. Nepstad, L. M. Curran, G. C. Cerqueira, R. A. Garcia, C. A. Ramos, E. Voll, A. McDonald, P. Lefebvre, and P. Schlesinger. 2006. “Modeling conservation in the Amazon Basin.” Nature 440: 520-523.

The Economist. 2009. “The Amazon: The Future of the Forest.” The Economist , June 11. Accessed July 25, 2016. http://www.nature.com/news/stopping-deforestation-battle-for-the-amazon-1.17223

The Nature Conservancy. 2016. “The Amazon Rainforest.” Accessed July 18. http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/southamerica/brazil/placesweprotect/amazon-rainforest-infographic.xml

Tollefson, J. 2015. “Stopping Deforestation: Battle for the Amazon.” Nature News Feature , April 1.

World Wildlife Fund (WWF). 2016. “Amazon Threats.” Accessed July 18. http://wwf.panda.org/what_we_do/where_we_work/amazon/amazon_threats/

The Amazon Fund:  http://www.amazonfund.gov.br/en/amazon-fund/

Greenpeace:  http://www.greenpeace.org/international/Global/international/code/2014/amazon/index.html

REDD:  https://unredd.net/about/what-is-redd-plus.html

The Nature Conservancy:  http://www.nature.org/ourinitiatives/regions/southamerica/brazil/placesweprotect/amazon.xml

The author wishes to acknowledge the contributions of Karin Ellison, OEC - Life and Environmental Sciences Editor, and Joseph Herkert, OEC Engineering Co-Editor. They provided valuable input in selecting topics and crafting the resources.

This case study addresses several important ethical issues around the topic of biodiversity and tropical deforestation in the Amazon. I also see it as a useful starting point for guiding OEC users to a wider range of issues around the ethics of international biodiversity research and environmental action.

By having the study’s protagonists be native to and working in Brazil, the case study misses the chance to ask what ethical issues OEC users based at American institutions might consider when they work in foreign countries in areas such as biodiversity research or conservation. I propose a few, but this is not an exhaustive set.

First, for anyone doing biodiversity research, a fundamental tenet of international law (i.e., the Convention on Biological Diversity or CBD) is that nations have sovereign control of their biological resources and that scientific needs do not override a country’s rules. This means that all researchers must secure the required research permits, collections permits and/or material transfer agreements for each area in which they work; the requirements and processes can vary within and between countries. In the past, non-compliance with such requirements has had serious negative consequences for some researchers, students, projects, U.S. universities and even international relationships between the United States and other countries. Alas, right now, the ethical path, i.e., following those rules, can be especially cumbersome and time-consuming because many countries are working to develop or revise their biodiversity-related rules to comply with the 2014 addition to the CBD treaty, known as the Nagoya Protocol (NP) on Access and Benefit Sharing of Genetic Resources. The NP website , and the CBD’s Access and benefit-Sharing Clearing-House , have a vast array of country-specific information that could assist many OEC users, especially researchers, follow the right steps; a guest blog that I wrote on this shifting landscape also provides some tips for researchers.

A second issue in foreign countries is that the ethical landscape around biodiversity, i.e., the sets of values held by different groups, can be vastly different than those familiar to Americans scientists. When I taught a course on tropical deforestation with an economist several decades ago, I discovered a rich literature on the various value constructs underlying human-nature relationships, including the Judeo-Christian stewardship perspective that underlies many conservation efforts, as well as beliefs shaped by other religions, and by secular, utilitarian/economical, interconnectivity, and deep ecology/intrinsic value views, for example. Understanding how these views play out in different countries is difficult; one cannot assume that various foreign communities will embrace the mainstream scientific mindset that U.S. researchers might carry. For example, many countries in South America have adopted the view that “Mother Earth” has her own rights and that countries need to protect the rights of wildlife and forests . (Note that this is not just an international issue – Native American peoples can also have different values that guide human-nature interactions in their sovereign nations within the United States.) More in-depth consideration of these topics can be found by OEC readers in journals such as Environmental Ethics ; Culture Matters , a report by a National Academies of Science group, also touches on the importance of many facets of culture in arranging fair and equitable international research partnerships, including in environmental fields.

In the case study the Senator and his Science Advisor bring differing perspectives on the value of the rain forest, with the former weighing heavily the economic and social benefits and his advisor arguing for the intrinsic value of the forest and its ecosystem. OEC readers can examine this potential conflict more deeply by tapping into the worldwide IPBES community that is forging consensus on the valuation and conservation of ecosystem services. IPBES, the Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services , is an international agreement established in 2012 and signed by 126 countries, including the United States. (I was honored to be part of the U.S. delegation to the First IPBES Plenary in 2013). OEC readers will find that a recent paper by the IPBES Expert Group on Ecosystem Values, with 48 authors from 31 countries, brings a wide range of international, cultural and scientific perspectives to the valuation of ecosystem services and most importantly, expands the discussion from an intrinsic vs. human economic valuation to a pluralistic approach that incorporates diverse values: “ Valuing nature’s contributions to people: the IPBES approach ."

Author: Elizabeth Lyons, NSF Office of International Science and Engineering.

This material is based upon work done while serving at the National Science Foundation. Any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

In this case, Armando must consider competing interests among his constituents, colleagues, and advisors while being mindful of the myriad ethical dilemmas in which the forest is implicated. Here, we will consider the biodiversity and ecosystem services associated with the forest, the social and economic issues surrounding deforestation, and the options available to Armando as he makes his recommendation on how to use the US funds. Finally, we will explore the role of Maria as a science advisor and address her responsibilities, as well as her mistake in addressing the press.

The Amazon Rain Forest is the largest tropical forest on earth (6.7 million km 2 … eight times the size of Texas!); it contains more than half the planet’s rainforests and record amounts of biodiversity. Brazil, the largest country in South America, encompasses the largest portion of the Amazon within its borders, particularly in the states of Amazonas and Pará in Northern Brazil. Although there is no current, official species count, Brazil likely contains around 50,000 species of plants alone, accounting for one-sixth of the earth’s plant species (Myers et al. 2000). A 2005 estimate put the total number of species (plants and animals, both vertebrates and invertebrates) in Brazil at between 170,000 and 210,000 species, or approximately 9.5% the world total (Lewinsohn and Prado 2005). Deep within the forest, it is easy to feel isolated from human issues, totally encompassed by wild nature. But the forest is very much central to social, economic, and environmental interests at local, national, and global scales.

In the last 50 years, around 20% of the forest cover has been lost to logging, development, and agriculture (WWF 2016, The Nature Conservancy 2016). Deforestation leads to loss of biodiversity, particularly through habitat loss and habitat fragmentation. Biodiversity loss in the Amazon can affect the global pharmacology sector, the regional tourism sector, and the scientists and environmentalists the world over who praise the intrinsic value of the unique and unparalleled plants and animals found there.

In addition to threats to biodiversity, the regional and global regulatory ecosystem services provided by the Brazilian Amazon are also in jeopardy. Plants in the Amazon contain between 90 and 140 billion tons of carbon (Soares-Filho et al. 2006). In perspective, human induced carbon emissions occur at a rate around 35 billion tons a year (and growing) (IPCC Report 2014). When trees are logged, the forest’s capacity to absorb and hold CO 2 is greatly reduced. In particular, land use change for agriculture contributes to human emissions by burning off CO 2 contained within slashed and burned portions of the forest. In addition to being a carbon reservoir, the Amazon plays a crucial role in the water cycle. The forest recycles 25-50% of regional rainfall (Eltahir and Bras 1994), but large-scale deforestation could break the cycle and reduce average regional rainfall. The Amazon also impacts the amount of cloudiness, thermal insolation, land surface reflectance, atmospheric aerosol loading (which could effect global rain patterns), and surface roughness (affecting regional wind speeds) (reviewed in Malhi et al. 2008).

Besides regional and global ecosystem services, the forest holds local economic value to Brazilian citizens living in the forest. Though there are sustainable ways to live off of the forest, such as rubber tapping, many more people either directly or indirectly derive their income from logging. For example, in Tailândia, Pará, 70% of the 25,000 people living in the city depend financially on deforestation in some way (Economist 2009). Loggers take the best and most valuable trees for their lumber business, while farmers and cattle ranchers depend on cleared lands for their agricultural purposes.

Social issues in the forest abound. In the 1960s through the 1980s, the Brazilian government subsidized the mass migration of citizens into the forest in efforts to begin economically utilizing the country’s vast interior (Economist 2009; Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009). However, once citizens moved into the forest, promises of free land and prosperity were met only for the lucky few. Members of the elite class bought land ahead of the mass migration, and to demonstrate ownership they immediately began to log and burn the land.  Still today, the top 1% of affluent landlords oversees 45% of the land (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009). And “only 14% of privately owned land is backed by secure title deed,” while the rest is backed with fake documents (Imazon study quoted, Economist 2009).

Many low-income families living in the forest are forced to work in harsh conditions governed largely by landlords, gangs, poachers, and illegal loggers (Garcia-Navarro 2015; Economist 2009; Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009). It is said, “the law of the Amazon is made by the bullet” (Nordhaus and Shellenberger 2009, 49). For example, a recent NPR report details the ongoing “war over wood” between rubber-tappers and illegal loggers in protected portions of the forest. Illegal loggers are barely penalized, due to a lacking and understaffed police force. When rubber tappers who depend on the intact ecosystem encounter loggers, arguments are settled with bullets, knives, and murder. Rubber-tappers fight to defend their way of life. Loggers not only fight to protect their illegal jobs, but also their own lives. Many are impoverished and treated no better than slave laborers, overseen by cruel gang lords who run the illegal logging operations (Garcia-Navarro 2015). 

Finally, there is a long history of fear over foreign involvement in Brazilian affairs. Nordhaus and Shellenberger (2009) summarize:

“As a country of great artists, architects, diplomats, designers, and engineers, and as people who speak Portuguese in a region where Spanish dominates, Brazilians justifiably see themselves as special and unique. At the same time, many Brazilians are ashamed of the persistence of widespread poverty, violence, and lawlessness… This stew of national pride and shame results in Brazil’s love-hate relationship with the United States. Environmentalists’ efforts to reassure Brazilians that their attempts to save the Amazon are in Brazil’s best interests not only fail to assuage Brazilian concerns, they trigger Brazil’s fear of being patronized…

Brazilians continue to see environmental proposals [such as working with US funds to establish a new national park] as suspicious. …Brazilians ask themselves … ‘Do you care about us or just our forest?’” (60-61).

Armando will consider these multi-scale social, economic, and environmental interests as he decides how to recommend using the US funds. He must also manage input from his constituents, his Senate colleagues, the US government, and Maria and his other trusted advisors. His personal compass further complicates his decision. Armando’s anthropocentric ethic and utilitarian view of the forest make him partial to social and economic interests. So although he is aware of the global and regional benefits of a protected area, his constituents have local, immediate needs that he feels more answerable to. Having grown up as a rubber tapper and having studied the forest extensively in school, Armando loves the Amazon, but he believes that people can co-exist with nature and there is no need for a national park that would restrict human use of the forest.

On the other hand, Maria’s ecocentric ethic fuels her bias toward preservation of the forest, particularly for its intrinsic value. She would like the forest protected in pure form, free from human influence. Her US-based education may contribute to her admiration of the US National Parks. And having come from the large city, Belém, Maria is detached from the direct interactions between people and nature occurring at the border of and within the Amazon in Pará, such as in Tailândia. Thus, it is understandable that she would believe the best policy is to create a national park, and as an advisor she can provide this opinion to Armando. It is his decision whether or not to act on Maria’s suggestion.

Maria should be able to perform her job as a science advisor despite her personal biases. It remains up to her how she elects to use her expertise. For example, Maria might choose to be an “Issue Advocate,” and “[focus] on the implications of [her] research for a particular political agenda” (Pielke 2007, 15). In the case study above, she did just that, aligning her policy suggestion to her ecocentric ethic and using media outreach to push her agenda. Maria could also be an “Honest Broker,” with a responsibility to provide information regarding a suite of different policy alternatives and how they will effect or be affected by the state of the forest. A politician or the political process (e.g., popular vote) takes on the responsibility of making a choice among the alternatives (Pielke 2007, 17). Armando’s negative reaction to Maria’s media statement and his disapproval of her narrow vision for a policy suggestion alludes to his preference for science advisors that act as “Honest Brokers.”

There is also a workplace authority problem in this case. It is possible that Maria could advocate her position and Armando would not mind. But, whether Armando agrees with her recommendation or not, she should not be talking to the press without permission from her boss. Typically, institutions (including Armando’s Senate office) have press secretaries that are charged with communicating to media outlets. Because she spoke to the press without a clear message, Maria and the reporter and editor at O Liberal who misunderstood her all share responsibility for the misquoted phrase. However, there is a possibility that the reporter did understand but decided to embellish the story. If that is the case Maria bears less responsibility, but speaking via a press secretary may have helped, as press secretaries are knowledgeable about how to communicate clearly and consistently with reputable news sources. If in the future Maria is allowed to speak directly with the press, she should be honest and she should be clear that her statements in no way reflect the as of yet unannounced opinions of Armando or any other members of Armando’s team. The press secretary will release statements that represent the views of the institution as a whole.

Considering that Armando does not plan to adopt Maria’s vision of a national park, below are a few alternative policy options that are more in line with Armando’s desire to both protect the forest and support his constituents with the funds (by no means, an exhaustive list). An “honest broker” analysis by a Maria might have revealed some of these policy alternatives. Note that many of them are not strictly scientific, an indicator that it may also be the job of a science advisor to collaborate with experts and advisors of different expertise to come up with a more thorough and inclusive field of potential policies.

Although law enforcement efforts in the forest have increased in recent years, “the basic factors driving deforestation — including poverty and the profitability of agricultural land — have not changed” (Tollefson 2015). To address these “basic factors,” Armando could use the funds to invest in local economic issues. For example, investing in public education and stimulating creation of service-economy jobs could help to eliminate the need for a logging-derived income. Another option, subsidization of advanced faming equipment, could preclude the need for slash and burn agriculture. Armando could also advocate using the funds to bolster efforts to put together a rural land registry in Pará (Tollefson 2015). A land registry could aid in easing violent disagreements over land ownership and allow the government to more easily enforce land-use laws. These locally minded suggestions would also be appealing to Brazilians who would like to minimize replicating or depending on the American environmental movement.

Funds could also be used for a “payment-for-ecosystem-services” (PES) scheme for the farmers within Pará. Such a scheme would reward farmers for keeping parts of the forest that fall within their property intact. For example, a farmer could be paid for the economic hit they take for not planting on a forested portion of their property. However, PES schemes are difficult to implement (e.g., how do you decide the value of the intact forest? How do you monitor the scheme?), and an Amazon forest PES scheme may only benefit large land owners because they are the ones who own the majority of land (or at least appear to own the majority of land based on documents, both legal and fake) (Börner et al. 2010). PES schemes could also be internationally scaled, such as REDD  (“reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation”), in which foreign countries pay Brazil to keep the forest intact to prevent the carbon emissions associated with deforestation. In 2015, Norway paid the last installment of an unprecedented $1 billion investment in the program. However, Brazilian farmers and local programs complain that they’ve seen few direct benefits from the REDD program (Tollefson 2015).

Another idea, Armando could use funds to advertise and implement a boycott of products and goods that are implicated in deforestation. For example, initially backed and promoted by the international environmental organization, Greenpeace, the Soyabean Moratorium is essentially an agreement among soyabean exporters (led by McDonald’s) to cease buying from growers in the Amazon and to fund monitoring programs to ensure the success of the moratorium (Greenpeace 2016; Tollefson 2015; Economist 2009). The moratorium appears successful thus far. A 2015 study found that deforestation was higher in areas not under the moratorium, compared to those that were (Gibbs et al. 2015). Funding could potentially be used to maintain and expand the soyabean moratorium, or to replicate it in the cattle or logging industries.

What remains for Armando, is to decide which of the options (among these and among others) he thinks could be successful and desirable. Then he will advocate his selection to his colleagues and constituents in the upcoming Federal Senate session.

Related Resources

Submit Content to the OEC   Donate

This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under Award No. 2055332. Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the National Science Foundation.

• Share full article

Advertisement

Subscriber-only Newsletter

Climate Forward

‘narco-deforestation’ and the future of the amazon.

The fate of Colombia’s rainforest may lay in the hands of a rebel group linked to drugs and illegal mining.

By Manuela Andreoni

There’s a struggle for law and order in many of the world’s tropical forests, and nature is losing.

Last week, I wrote about the major progress Colombia made in 2023, slashing deforestation rates by 49 percent in a single year. But this week, we learned the trend reversed significantly in the first quarter of this year. Preliminary figures show tree loss was up 40 percent since the start of the year, Colombia’s Minister of Environment, Susana Muhamad, told reporters on Monday .

Why have things changed so quickly? Mostly because a single armed group controls much of Colombia’s rainforests.

Muhamad explained that conflicts with Estado Mayor Central, a group that is thought to run a sprawling cocaine operation among other illegal activities, were partly behind the striking numbers. “In this case, nature is being placed in the middle of the conflict,” she said. According to experts, E.M.C. had largely banned deforestation and in recent months it seems to have allowed it again.

A 2023 United Nations report referred to this entanglement between drug trafficking and environmental crime as “ narco-deforestation .” Perhaps nowhere is that phenomenon more clear than in Colombia, a country that’s both a stage for the decades-old global war on drugs and one of the most biodiverse corners of the planet, where the Andes Mountains meet the vast Amazon rainforest.

But what’s happening in Colombia underscores a growing challenge for many developing countries. Vast pristine forests are both essential to curb climate change and biodiversity loss, and they’re also prized by groups who want to hide illegal activities beneath thick tree canopies.

Today I want to explain why experts on the ground say that there’s no way to protect crucial forests like the Amazon without dealing with the growing power of armed groups.

The Colombian case

Armed groups in Colombia have long prohibited logging in the forest. The main reason, experts say, was to protect the illegal drug operations that the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, or FARC, ran in the forest.

FARC’s role protecting the forest became clear after 2016, when it signed a peace deal with the Colombian government, which disarmed the group and turned it into a political party called Comunes . When FARC disbanded, a local power vacuum caused deforestation rates to skyrocket as cattle ranchers, illegal miners and dissident groups cut down forests.

But as the dust settled, the Estado Mayor Central, a dissident group controlled by Ivan Mordisco, a former FARC commander , consolidated power in much of the Colombian rainforest. The old FARC tactics of restricting logging seemed to return and deforestation rates started to fall again. Until recently.

Muhamad noted that El Niño may have also made the Amazon more vulnerable to forest fires this year. I called Rodrigo Botero, the director of an environmental nonprofit in Colombia called the Foundation for Conservation and Sustainable Development, to understand what else changed. He told me they can see new roads being opened and ranches expanding in the region. Government agents can’t stop it because the group, which is estimated to have over 3,000 troops , controls access to much of the forest.

It’s not totally clear why the E.M.C. seems to have begun allowing logging again. Botero said he feared the E.M.C. could be trying to use deforestation rates as leverage to get more favorable treatment from the government.

First, they showed the government the benefits they could deliver by forbidding deforestation, he explained. And then, Botero added, it was like they told the government, “if you can’t count on us, look at what we can do.”

It’s a global problem, too

There is no evidence that the E.M.C. were successful in what seems to be an attempt to use the Amazon as a political tool. The government says it’s actively trying to arrest Mordisco .

Politics aside, what the Colombian case made clear to me is that controlling armed groups is now a fundamental part of conservation policy.

Bram Ebus, a consultant at the International Crisis Group and an investigative reporter, has spent years documenting how both drug traffickers and rebel groups like the E.M.C. are expanding their reach in the rainforests of South America in a project called Amazon Underworld .

He told me the illegal trade managed by these powerful criminal groups is no longer restricted to drugs or minerals, though they are still major sources of income. There is growing concern that criminal networks are also tapping into a vast menu of businesses to launder their illegal gains, such as illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, ranching and land grabbing.

Researchers, journalists and government officials have long documented how mining funded conflict in Africa, Asia and Latin Americ a. Nature was collateral damage. Illegal mining operations connected to conflict have been very harmful to biodiversity in the Congo River Basin’s rainforest , for example.

Colombia continues to negotiate for peace, and its Ministry of Environment and Sustainable Development didn’t comment on whether the Amazon was being used as a political tool, but added that violations will be investigated and that it will continue working to curb deforestation. (The E.M.C. could not be reached for comment.) But, in many cases, it’s becoming hard to tell politically motived groups from purely criminal gangs. That’s bad news for nature and whoever dares defend it .

Many countries simply don’t have the resources to protect forests, let alone take on armed groups. Right now, one of the developing countries with the biggest budget for forest protection, Brazil, has so few officers that each worker patrols on average an area the size of Denmark, according to an association of environmental protection officers. They are now striking to protest poor working conditions .

Meanwhile, criminal and rebel groups have continued to expand their reach.

“You see that all these groups who are participating in the conflict have one key objective, which is to expand, to get more troops, to get more money, to get more territorial control,” Ebus told me. “The environment right now is a hostage of war.”

Getting rid of ‘forever chemicals’

What happened : For the first time, the federal government is requiring municipal water systems to remove six synthetic chemicals linked to cancer and other health problems that are present in the tap water of hundreds of millions of Americans, my colleague Lisa Friedman reported.

The Environmental Protection Agency will start requiring that water providers reduce perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, known collectively as PFAS, to near-zero levels. The compounds, found in everything from dental floss to firefighting foams to children’s toys, are called “forever chemicals” because they never fully degrade and can accumulate in the body and the environment. The new effort will cost at least $1.5 billion per year.

Where PFAS are found: The chemicals are so ubiquitous that they can be found in the blood of almost every person in the United States. A recent study that tested 45,000 water samples around the world found that about 31 percent of samples that weren’t near any obvious source of contamination had PFAS levels considered harmful to human health, as my colleague Delger Erdenesanaa wrote this week .

Exposure to PFAS has been associated with metabolic disorders, decreased fertility in women, developmental delays in children and increased risk of some prostate, kidney and testicular cancers, according to the E.P.A. (Lisa wrote a helpful explainer on what else we need to know about PFAS .)

The new regulation is “life changing,” Michael S. Regan, the E.P.A. administrator, told Lisa. “We are one huge step closer to finally shutting off the tap on forever chemicals once and for all.”

So what can you do to avoid PFAS? The E.P.A. maintains a list of cleaning products that are safe from these chemicals . And the Environmental Working Group, a nonprofit, has been tracking companies that say they are stripping them from their products. — Manuela Andreoni

More climate news

H&M and Zara are buying cotton linked to environmental destruction and land grabbing in Brazil’s grasslands, according to an investigative report reviewed by Context .

Solar power plants produced more energy in Texas than coal for the first time in March, Canary Media reports .

The Washington Post maps access to nature in neighborhoods across the United States .

Thanks for being a subscriber.

Read past editions of the newsletter here .

If you’re enjoying what you’re reading, please consider recommending it to others. They can sign up here . Browse all of our subscriber-only newsletters here . And follow The New York Times on Instagram , Threads , Facebook and TikTok at @nytimes.

Reach us at [email protected] . We read every message, and reply to many!

Manuela Andreoni is a Times climate and environmental reporter and a writer for the Climate Forward newsletter. More about Manuela Andreoni

Learn More About Climate Change

Have questions about climate change? Our F.A.Q. will tackle your climate questions, big and small .

“Buying Time,” a new series from The New York Times, looks at the risky ways  humans are starting to manipulate nature  to fight climate change.

Big brands like Procter & Gamble and Nestlé say a new generation of recycling plants will help them meet environmental goals, but the technology is struggling to deliver .

The Italian energy giant Eni sees future profits from collecting carbon dioxide and pumping it  into natural gas fields that have been exhausted.

New satellite-based research reveals how land along the East Coast is slumping into the ocean, compounding the danger from global sea level rise . A major culprit: the overpumping of groundwater.

Did you know the ♻ symbol doesn’t mean something is actually recyclable ? Read on about how we got here, and what can be done.

share this!

April 17, 2024

This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility:

fact-checked

peer-reviewed publication

trusted source

Amazon butterflies show how new species can evolve from hybridization

by Harvard University

If evolution was originally depicted as a tree, with different species branching off as new blooms, then new research shows how the branches may actually be more entangled. In "Hybrid speciation driven by multilocus introgression of ecological traits," published in Nature , Harvard researchers show that hybrids between species of butterflies can produce new species that are genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier forebears.

Writing to Charles Darwin in 1861, naturalist Henry Walter Bates described brightly colored Heliconius butterflies of the Amazon as "a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species." More than 160 years later, an international team of researchers led by biologists Neil Rosser, Fernando Seixas, James Mallet, and Kanchon Dasmahapatra also focused on Heliconius to document the evolution of a new species.

Using whole-genome sequencing , the researchers have shown that a hybridization event some 180,000 years ago between Heliconius melpomene and the ancestor of today's Heliconius pardalinus produced a third hybrid species, Heliconius elevatus. Although descended from hybrids, H. elevatus is a distinct butterfly species with its own individual traits, including its caterpillar's host plant and the adult's male sex pheromones, color pattern , wing shape, flight, and mate choice. All three species now fly together across a vast area of the Amazon rainforest.

"Historically hybridization was thought of as a bad thing that was not particularly important when it came to evolution," said Rosser, an associate of entomology at the Museum of Comparative Zoology and formerly a postdoctoral fellow both in Mallet's lab at Harvard and in Dasmahapatra's lab in York, UK. Rosser handled the genetic mapping with co-first author Seixas, another postdoctoral fellow.

"But what genomic data have shown is that actually hybridization among species is widespread."

The implications may alter how we view species. "A lot of species are not intact units," said Rosser. "They're quite leaky, and they're exchanging genetic material."

Historically, hybridization has been thought to inhibit the creation of new species. Yet in this case, the researchers say, hybridization is not only happening in these butterfly species, but has also driven the evolution of a new species in itself.

"So the species that are evolving are constantly exchanging genes, and the consequence of this is that it can actually trigger the evolution of completely new lineages," said Rosser.

Mallet, professor of organismic and evolutionary biology and co-author on the research, said, "Normally, species are thought to be reproductively isolated. They can't produce hybrids that are reproductively fertile." While there is now evidence of hybridization between species, what was difficult to confirm was that this hybridization is, in some way, involved in speciation. As Mallet put it, "The question is: How can you collapse two species together and get a third species out of that collapse."

The new research provides a next step in understanding how hybridization and speciation work. "Over the last 10 or 15 years, there's been a paradigm shift in terms of the importance of hybridization and evolution," explained Rosser.

This research has the potential to play a role in the current biodiversity crisis. Understanding something as basic as "what we mean by a species," said Mallet, "is important for saving species and for conservation," particularly in the Amazon, he noted.

In addition, such work may prove useful in understanding carriers of disease. Multiple species of mosquito, for example, can carry malaria. Although these mosquitos are closely related, "almost nothing is known about how they interact, and whether they hybridize with each other," he noted.

Journal information: Nature

Provided by Harvard University

Explore further

Feedback to editors

Ghost particle on the scales: Research offers more precise determination of neutrino mass

2 hours ago

Light show in living cells: New method allows simultaneous fluorescent labeling of many proteins

Warming of Antarctic deep-sea waters contribute to sea level rise in North Atlantic, study finds

Unraveling water mysteries beyond Earth: Ground-penetrating radar will seek bodies of water on Jupiter

Baby white sharks prefer being closer to shore, scientists find

7 hours ago

Key protein regulates immune response to viruses in mammal cells

11 hours ago

Unraveling the mysteries of consecutive atmospheric river events

14 hours ago

Research team resolves decades-long problem in microscopy

RNA's hidden potential: New study unveils its role in early life and future bioengineering

15 hours ago

Smoother surfaces make for better accelerators

Relevant physicsforums posts, can four legged animals drink from beneath their feet.

Apr 15, 2024

Mold in Plastic Water Bottles? What does it eat?

Apr 14, 2024

Dolphins don't breathe through their esophagus

Is this egg-laying or something else.

Apr 13, 2024

Color Recognition: What we see vs animals with a larger color range

Apr 12, 2024

How to Implement Beamforming in Ultrasound Diffraction Tomography

Apr 10, 2024

More from Biology and Medical

Related Stories

In a first, evolutionary biologists have identified a gene that influences visual preferences in tropical butterflies

Mar 21, 2024

Study of crossbred butterflies suggests multiple genes involved in hybrid animal sterility

Nov 20, 2023

Study reveals surprising amount of gene flow among butterfly species

Oct 31, 2019

Genomic analysis reveals dead-end hybridization between kiwifruit species

Jun 28, 2023

How a butterfly tree becomes a web

Jul 16, 2021

Two closely related fig species show signatures of hybridization at climatic margins

Sep 11, 2023

Recommended for you

How insects control their wings: The mysterious mechanics of insect flight

20 hours ago

Researchers train a bank of AI models to identify memory formation signals in the brain

22 hours ago

Researchers crack mystery of swirling vortexes in egg cells

Let us know if there is a problem with our content.

Use this form if you have come across a typo, inaccuracy or would like to send an edit request for the content on this page. For general inquiries, please use our contact form . For general feedback, use the public comments section below (please adhere to guidelines ).

Please select the most appropriate category to facilitate processing of your request

Thank you for taking time to provide your feedback to the editors.

Your feedback is important to us. However, we do not guarantee individual replies due to the high volume of messages.

E-mail the story

Your email address is used only to let the recipient know who sent the email. Neither your address nor the recipient's address will be used for any other purpose. The information you enter will appear in your e-mail message and is not retained by Phys.org in any form.

Newsletter sign up

Get weekly and/or daily updates delivered to your inbox. You can unsubscribe at any time and we'll never share your details to third parties.

More information Privacy policy

Donate and enjoy an ad-free experience

We keep our content available to everyone. Consider supporting Science X's mission by getting a premium account.

E-mail newsletter

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

‘Harvard Thinking’: Is AI friend or foe? Wrong question.

Getting ahead of dyslexia

Why AI fairness conversations must include disabled people

Researcher James Mallet displays a Heliconius elevatus specimen.

Photos by Kris Snibbe/Harvard Staff Photographer

Amazon butterfly evolved from hybrids

Genomic findings challenge thinking on what makes a species

Harvard Correspondent

Writing to Charles Darwin in 1861, naturalist Henry Walter Bates described brightly colored Heliconius  butterflies of the Amazon as “a glimpse into the laboratory where Nature manufactures her new species.” More than 160 years later, an international research team including Harvard scientists also focused on this genus of butterflies to document the evolution of a new species.

In a paper published April 17 in Nature, the team found that hybrids between two Heliconius species of butterflies produced a new species genetically distinct from both parent species and their earlier forebears.

“A lot of species are not intact units. They’re quite leaky, and they’re exchanging genetic material.” Neil Rosser, Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology

Researchers used whole-genome sequencing to show that a hybridization event some 180,000 years ago between  Heliconius melpomene  and the ancestor of today’s  Heliconius pardalinus produced a third hybrid species,  Heliconius elevatus . Although descended from hybrids, H. elevatus is a distinct butterfly species with individual traits — including its caterpillar’s host plant and the adult’s male sex pheromones, color pattern, wing shape, flight, and mate choice. All three species now fly together across a vast area of the Amazon rainforest.

“Historically hybridization was thought of as a bad thing that was not particularly important when it came to evolution,” said Neil Rosser , an associate of entomology at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology who co-authored the study and handled its genetic mapping with Harvard postdoctoral fellow Fernando Seixas . “But what genomic data have shown is that actually hybridization among species is widespread.”

The findings may alter how we view species. “A lot of species are not intact units,” said Rosser. “They’re quite leaky, and they’re exchanging genetic material.”

Historically, hybridization has been thought to inhibit the creation of new species. Yet in this case, the researchers say, hybridization is driving the evolution of a new species. “The species that are evolving are constantly exchanging genes, and the consequence of this is that it can actually trigger the evolution of completely new lineages,” said Rosser.

“Normally, species are thought to be reproductively isolated,” added co-author James Mallet , professor of organismic and evolutionary biology at Harvard. “They can’t produce hybrids that are reproductively fertile.” While there is now evidence of hybridization between species, what was difficult to confirm was that this hybridization is, in some way, involved in speciation. As Mallet put it: “The question is: How can you collapse two species together and get a third species out of that collapse?”

The new research provides a next step in understanding how hybridization and speciation work. “Over the last 10 or 15 years, there’s been a paradigm shift in terms of the importance of hybridization and evolution,” Rosser said .

This research has the potential to play a role in the current biodiversity crisis. Understanding something as basic as what we mean by a species is important for saving species and for conservation, particularly in the Amazon, Mallet said. In addition, such work may prove useful in understanding carriers of disease. Multiple species of mosquito, for example, can carry malaria. Although these mosquitos are closely related, “almost nothing is known about how they interact, and whether they hybridize with each other,” he noted.

In addition to co-lead author Kanchon Dasmahapatra of the University of York in England, the international crew of researchers included Lucie M. Queste, Bruna Cama, Ronald Mori-Pezo, Dmytro Kryvokhyzha, Michaela Nelson, Rachel Waite-Hudson, Matt Goringe, Mauro Costa, Marianne Elias, Clarisse Mendes Eleres de Figueiredo, André Victor Lucci Freitas, Mathieu Joron, Krzysztof Kozak, Gerardo Lamas, Ananda R.P. Martins, W. Owen McMillan, Jonathan Ready, Nicol Rueda-Muñoz, Camilo Salazar, Patricio Salazar, Stefan Schulz, Leila T. Shirai, and Karina L. Silva-Brandão.

Share this article

You might like.

In podcast, a lawyer, computer scientist, and statistician debate ethics of artificial intelligence

Harvard lab’s research suggests at-risk kids can be identified before they ever struggle in school

Tech offers promise to help yet too often perpetuates ableism, say researchers. It doesn’t have to be this way.

Harvard announces return to required testing

Leading researchers cite strong evidence that testing expands opportunity

Women rarely die from heart problems, right? Ask Paula.

New book traces how medical establishment’s sexism, focus on men over centuries continues to endanger women’s health, lives

Finding right mix on campus speech policies

Legal, political scholars discuss balancing personal safety, constitutional rights, academic freedom amid roiling protests, cultural shifts

Ancient artists high on hallucinogens carved dancer rock art in Peru, study suggests

The research notes similarities between the carvings in southern Peru and the ayahuasca-induced art of the Amazon's Tucano people.

Ancient rock carvings in southern Peru could have been made by people high on hallucinogenic drugs, a new study suggests.

The carvings likely portray dancers and are featured on more than 2,000 boulders in the dry gorge of Toro Muerto (Spanish for "Dead Bull") in the valley of the Majes River. They are thought to be between 1,400 and 2,100 years old. Archaeologists think many were carved between 100 B.C. and A.D. 600 by the Siguas people, who were influenced by the Nasca (or Nazca) culture of southern Peru that made the famous geoglyphs in the desert of the same name.

But wavy lines in the rock carvings are also strikingly similar to art made in the 1970s by the Tucano (also spelled Tukano) people indigenous to the Amazon rainforest in Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador. In those cases, the Tucano made their art during visionary states caused by ingesting the hallucinogen ayahuasca — a drink made from the vine Banisteriopsis caapi . These similarities suggest that the Peruvian rock carvings may also have been influenced by similar visions, according to the new study, published on April 3 in the Cambridge Archaeological Journal .

Related: 9,000-year-old rock art discovered among dinosaur footprints in Brazil

Dancing carvings

Study co-author Andrzej Rozwadowski , an archaeologist at Poland’s Adam Mickiewicz University, explained that many early researchers used the Latin American term "danzantes," meaning "dancers," to describe the carvings at Toro Muerto. It wasn't absolutely established that the figures were dancing, but many of them appeared to be, he told Live Science.

Many of the carvings "are characterized by dynamic poses, the knees of some of them are bent, the legs of others are straight but spread widely, suggesting movement," said Rozwadowski, who conducted the study with Wołoszyn Janusz , an archaeologist at the University of Warsaw. The research was carried out by a Polish-Peruvian team led by Janusz and Liz Gonzales Ruiz , the director of the Toro Muerto Archaeological Project .

The study also suggests that geometric patterns of wavy lines and circles depicted in bands along the dancing figures may represent a parallel world, the cosmos, or an afterlife, as seen in Tucano art made in the 1970s. In a notable case, one of the carvings at Toro Muerto is remarkably similar to a set of 20th-century Tucano drawings that portray scenes from ayahuasca visions.

Sign up for the Live Science daily newsletter now

Get the world’s most fascinating discoveries delivered straight to your inbox.

"The logical conjecture … is that the central danzante surrounded by wavy lines is actually 'surrounded' by songs, which — embodying energy and power simultaneously — were the source of transfer to another world," the authors wrote.

Visionary drugs

Rozwadowski stressed that the similarities between the ancient Toro Muerte carvings and the ayahuasca-influenced Tucano art didn't necessarily mean that the Toro Muerte carvers, too, were high on hallucinogens; instead, the imagery could have derived from an artistic convention for portraying a parallel world or the cosmos.

In any case, the ancient peoples of southern Peru probably didn't use ayahuasca — a drink made from vines from the Amazonian rainforest, many hundreds of miles away and on the far side of the Andes.

But it's thought the Wari people, who lived in the region between A.D. 400 and 1000, used hallucinogens from the seed pods of the Anadenanthera colubrina tree, which probably existed in the region when the carvings at Toro Muerto were made.

Rozwadowski added that the large number of carvings at Toro Muerto meant it was a significant site and perhaps a place for teaching.

"One of the reasons for the importance of the site may have been the transfer of knowledge, and some petroglyphs could be a visualization of this knowledge," he said.

— 2,000-year-old carvings of celestial bodies and animals discovered on rocky cliffs in Brazil

— Stunning rock art site reveals that humans settled the Colombian Amazon 13,000 years ago

— Centuries-old technique reveals hidden '3D' animals in Paleolithic cave art

Justin Jennings , senior curator of Archaeology of the Americas at the Royal Ontario Museum in Toronto who wasn't involved in the study, said that the parallels between the Toro Muerto carvings and Tucano art were striking and may both relate to ideas of how the cosmos began.

"It's a cool idea, and very much worthy of further exploration," he told Live Science in an email.

But "Twentieth century Columbia is a world away, both geographically and temporally, and I am more hesitant than the authors in suggesting that we can think of a shared cosmovision between the Amazon and the Andes that could have endured for so long."

Tom Metcalfe is a freelance journalist and regular Live Science contributor who is based in London in the United Kingdom. Tom writes mainly about science, space, archaeology, the Earth and the oceans. He has also written for the BBC, NBC News, National Geographic, Scientific American, Air & Space, and many others.

Maya ruler burned bodies of old dynasty during regime change, charred human remains reveal

Modern Japanese people arose from 3 ancestral groups, 1 of them unknown, DNA study suggests

'Unprecedented' discovery of mysterious circular monument near 2 necropolises found in France

• Neru It's a phenomenon that's still going on to this day :-) Go walk the city streets and look around... Reply
• View All 1 Comment

Most Popular

• 2 'Gambling with your life': Experts weigh in on dangers of the Wim Hof method
• 3 'Exceptional' prosthesis of gold, silver and wool helped 18th-century man live with cleft palate
• 4 NASA spacecraft snaps mysterious 'surfboard' orbiting the moon. What is it?
• 5 AI pinpoints where psychosis originates in the brain
• 2 NASA's downed Ingenuity helicopter has a 'last gift' for humanity — but we'll have to go to Mars to get it
• 3 2,500-year-old skeletons with legs chopped off may be elites who received 'cruel' punishment in ancient China
• 4 Modern Japanese people arose from 3 ancestral groups, 1 of them unknown, DNA study suggests
• 5 The universe may be dominated by particles that break causality and move faster than light, new paper suggests