Smoke rising from wildfires in the Amazon Rainforest in São Lourenco in the state of Rondonia, Brazil on Sept. 13, 2024. Wang Tiancong / Xinhua via Getty Images
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A recent analysis of the Amazon Rainforest has revealed that while deforestation declined in 2024, the level of degradation from factors like wildfires and logging increased 497% in the same time period.
According to Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon), a nonprofit and research institute based in Brazil, deforestation, or the complete clearing of vegetation, declined by 7% in 2024 compared to 2023. This marked the second consecutive year of declining deforestation numbers.
However, over 36,379 square kilometers of the rainforest were degraded last year, compared to the 6,092 square kilometers affected by land degradation in 2023. Degradation in 2024 was the highest since 2009, Imazon reported.
Forest fires were a major contributor to land degradation, according to Imazon. The Rainforest Foundation reported that 2024 had the highest number of fires in the Brazilian Amazon since 2005, burning an area of land larger than the state of California.
As Mongabay reported, extreme drought over two years made some areas more prone to burning, and ongoing effects of climate change could continue to impact precipitation patterns and damage the rainforest ecosystem.
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Experts expect some relief from fires over the winter, when higher rainfall will keep degradation from wildfires at bay. But they also emphasize a need for more conservation areas to reduce other degradation factors, such as logging.
“At the beginning of 2025, we recommend that managers take advantage of the rainy season, known as the ‘Amazon winter,’ to organize the strengthening of actions to protect the Amazon, since the tendency is for deforestation to return as soon as the rains reduce,” Carlos Souza, coordinator for Imazon’s Amazon Monitoring Program, said in a statement. “In addition to monitoring measures and punishing illegal deforesters, it is essential to allocate public lands that do not yet have a defined use for conservation, a measure to combat land grabbing.”
While degradation increased sharply, data provided by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) in November 2024 showed that deforestation fell 30.6% from July 2023 to July 2024, reaching a low not seen since 2015, Reuters reported.
But deforestation, even when in decline, remains a major problem for the Amazon. According to Imazon, the amount of land affected by deforestation in 2024 still totaled 3,739 square kilometers, which equated to more than 1,000 football fields of forest lost each day. In some areas of Brazil, deforestation even increased last year.
Pará had 3% more land lost in 2024 compared to 2023, and the state had the highest amount of deforestation in Brazil for the ninth year in a row. Pará also led the country for the highest amount of forest degradation for 2024.
The extensive damage through degradation and deforestation has experts concerned that the Amazon could soon reach a tipping point, described by Carbon Brief as a time when the Amazon experiences enough stress to trigger major vegetation die-offs that turn the ecosystem into a dry savannah, permanently.
“The fires and drought experienced in 2024 across the Amazon Rainforest could be ominous indicators that we are reaching the long-feared ecological tipping point,” Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, told The Associated Press. “Humanity’s window of opportunity to reverse this trend is shrinking, but still open.”
Degradation and forest loss is not only a concern in the Amazon Rainforest. Globally, land degradation is increasing by about 1 million square kilometers per year, roughly the size of Egypt, according to a recent report from the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) and the UN Convention to Combat Desertification (UNCCD). Already, PIK has warned that original forest cover globally is at about 60%, but the safe planetary boundary requires about 75% of original forest cover.
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