Concetti Chiave
The Amazon Rainforest, one of the world's most vital ecosystems, is facing unprecedented levels of deforestation and degradation due to human activities and climate change, posing a grave threat to the environment and global climate.
Sintesi
The content provides a sobering overview of the alarming state of the Amazon Rainforest, highlighting the severe and widespread deforestation and degradation it is facing.
Key highlights:
- Vast swathes of the rainforest have been cleared and converted into cattle pastures, farms, and other land uses, with millions of kilometers of illegal roads cutting through the forest.
- Since the 1970s, at least 17% (1.1 million square kilometers) of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested, with most of this occurring in the last two decades.
- An additional 2 million square kilometers (the size of Mexico) has been degraded due to climate change, drought, logging, and wildfires.
- These four main drivers - climate change, drought, logging, and wildfires - are causing widespread and accelerating degradation of the Amazon ecosystem.
- The destruction of the Amazon Rainforest poses a grave threat to the environment, biodiversity, and global climate, as the rainforest is a crucial carbon sink and regulator of regional and global weather patterns.
Statistiche
At least 17 percent — about 1.1 million square kilometers — of the Amazon Rainforest has been deforested by human beings since the 1970s.
Another 2 million square kilometers of the rainforest, an area about the size of Mexico, has been degraded by climate change, drought, logging, and wildfire.
Tens of thousands of square kilometers go up in flames across the Amazon Basin every year; some 10,000 wildfires have blazed through 11,000 square kilometers of the rainforest so far this year alone.
Citazioni
"These are the four main drivers of degradation in the Amazon," Dolors Armenteras Pascual, an ecologist at the National University of Colombia who has studied Amazonian ecosystems for decades, told me via a Zoom chat.