According to a study, the Amazon has lost 9.7% of its vegetation in the past 37 years.

In 1985, only 6% (about 50 million hectares) of the area Amazon It has been converted to anthropic areas such as pastures, crops, mining or urban areas, but this area has almost tripled in 2021, reaching 15% (nearly 125 million hectares) of the entire region. This was a net loss of 9.7% of natural vegetation in just 37 years.

This is the conclusion of the data collected in the MapBiomas Amazonía Collection 4.0, an Amazon Network for Geo-referenced Social-environmental Information (Raisg) initiative that studies land-use changes in the Amazon biome and pressures on its forests and ecosystems.

The amount of destruction varies from country to country: in Suriname, Guyana and French Guiana it is only 1.6%, and in Brazil it is 19%.

This percentage (a net loss of almost 10% of natural vegetation) is very close to the critical point or point of no return, calculated by scientists in the range of 20% to 25% loss of vegetation cover. If the current trend is confirmed MapAmazon Biomesa biome that is a planetary carbon sink will reach the point of no return, irreversibly affecting its ecosystem services, and may become a savannah.

During the presentation of this tool, Cicero Cardoso, an expert from the Socio-Ecological Institute, clarified that 99% of the 75 million hectares that have been converted to anthropogenic areas over the past almost four decades are agricultural and forest land use, while “only 1% answered for mining and infrastructure”.

The glaciers of the Amazonian Andes, which provide water to millions of people and feed the sources of large rivers in the region, lost 46% of their ice during the analyzed period. Mineral extraction increased by 1,107% (more than a thousand percent, from 47,000 hectares in 1985 to more than 570,000 hectares in 2021).

How were measurements carried out in such an inhomogeneous region?

The initiative maps over three decades of 18 different land cover and use classes, such as forests, savannahs, mangroves, agricultural areas, urban areas, mining and glaciers, over three decades of 8 . 4 million km2 of the Amazon region, including the Andes, the Amazon Plain and the crossings from the Cerrado and Pantanal.

The results of the preliminary analysis show an accelerated transformation of the Amazon forests. According to the authors, the losses were huge, almost irreversible and with no prospect of reversing this trend. The data turn on the yellow light and give a sense of urgency for comprehensive, decisive and decisive international action.

“The MapBiomas Amazonia 4.0 collection is invaluable for understanding the dynamics of natural resource use in the region, as well as for climate modeling and calculation of greenhouse gas emissions and removals due to land use change in the region.” ,” said Tasso Azevedo, general coordinator of MapBiomas.

The authors highlight the contrast between the accelerated dynamics of land-use change that took place in the Amazon during the study period, and especially in the last thirty years, with the slowness that characterizes the pace of climate negotiations, which have made modest progress in almost three decades since the first Climate Summit.

For Harlem Marinho, Reisg’s climate change project coordinator, the absence of final agreements at COP27 on key climate change mitigation issues, such as phasing out all fossil fuels, will have implications for Amazon.

“This means that greenhouse gas emissions from fossil fuel use continue to put pressure on carbon sinks such as the Amazon rainforest. In addition, this lack of agreements could mean continued exploration of fossil fuels in the Amazon, followed by a reduction in the availability of carbon sinks and an increase in greenhouse gas emissions from land-use change and the subsequent burning of these fossil fuels,” Marinho said.