Amazon Deforestation

node · earth · Amazon Basin, concentrated in Brazil

The conversion of standing forest to other land uses, overwhelmingly concentrated in Brazil and overwhelmingly to cattle pasture, with soy, timber extraction, land speculation and mining behind it. The sequence is consistent enough to be predictive: a road is opened or improved, land values along it rise, forest is cleared and burned, cattle are placed on it to establish a possession claim, and mechanised cropping follows on the better soils once the claim is settled. Roughly a fifth of the original Brazilian Amazon forest has been cleared. What makes the record readable is that Brazil publishes it: INPE has produced an annual wall-to-wall clearance figure since 1988, which is why the Amazon has a measured deforestation history and most tropical forests do not. That record shows swings that are political rather than economic - a peak in the mid-1990s, a second peak in 2004, then a fall of roughly four-fifths over the following decade as enforcement, satellite alerts, credit restrictions and supply-chain agreements were applied together, a reversal from the mid-2010s to a peak in 2021, and a second sharp fall from 2023.