Amazon forest has lost an area the size of Germany and France

RIO DE JANEIRO: The world´s biggest rainforest, the Amazon, has lost an area about the size of Germany and France combined to deforestation in four decades, a study showed on Monday.

The South American jungle, spanning nine countries, is seen as crucial to the fight against climate change due to its ability to absorb planet-warming carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

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

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

RAISG experts reported an “accelerated transformation” of the Amazon, with an “alarming increase” in the use of land previously occupied by forest for mining, crops, or livestock. “A large number of ecosystems have disappeared to give way to immense expanses of pastures, soybean fields or other monocultures, or have been transformed into craters for gold mining,” they said.

“With the loss of the forest, we emit more carbon into the atmosphere and this disrupts an entire ecosystem that regulates the climate and the hydrological cycle, clearly affecting temperatures,” Sandra Rio Caceres, from the Institute of the Common Good -- a Peruvian association that took part in the study -- told AFP. She said she believes the loss of vegetation in the Amazon is directly linked to severe drought and wildfires affecting several South American countries.