Calculating Deforestation Figures for the Amazon

These figures are calculated from estimates provided by the Brazilian National Institute of Space Research (INPE) and the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO). The figures only refer to the Brazilian Amazon, which accounts for roughly 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest.



PeriodEstimated Remaining
Forest Cover
in the Brazilian Amazon
(sq. km)
Annual forest loss
(sq. km)
Percent of 1970
cover remaining
Total forest loss
since 1970
(sq. km)
pre-19704,100,000
19704,001,60097.6%
19773,955,87021,13096.5%144,130
1978-19873,744,57021,13091.3%355,430
19883,723,52021,05090.8%376,480
19893,705,75017,77090.4%394,250
19903,692,02013,73090.0%407,980
19913,680,99011,03089.8%419,010
19923,667,20413,78689.4%432,796
19933,652,30814,89689.1%447,692
19943,637,41214,89688.7%462,588
19953,608,35329,05988.0%491,647
19963,590,19218,16187.6%509,808
19973,576,96513,22787.2%523,035
19983,559,58217,38386.8%540,418
19993,542,32317,25986.4%557,677
20003,524,09718,22686.0%575,903
20013,505,93218,16585.5%594,068
20023,484,53821,39485.0%615,462
20033,459,29125,24784.4%640,709
20043,431,86827,42383.7%668,132
20053,413,02218,84683.2%686,978
20063,398,91314,10982.9%701,087
20073,387,38111,53282.6%712,619
20083,375,41311,96882.3%724,587



Recent news on deforestation in the Amazon



Tesco responds to allegations of causing Amazon deforestation

(06/29/2009) Tesco, one of Europe’s largest retailers, has sent a response to the British newspaper The Guardian in light of the paper's coverage of recent allegations that the chain store sells beef and leather products that caused deforestation of the Amazon.


Lear’s Macaw: back from the brink

(06/09/2009) The 2009 IUCN Red List for birds broke records by listing more Critically Endangered birds than ever before. Despite this, there were individual species that bucked the global trend: Lear’s Macaw Anodorhynchus leari, a bright blue parrot from northeastern Brazil, was one of these. Due to effective conservation measures the parrot’s population has reached nearly a thousand birds (up from a low of just a hundred individuals in 1989), and therefore was moved down the list, from Critically Endangered to Endangered.


Bill Clinton speaks out for rainforests in Brazil

(06/03/2009) Former US president Bill Clinton spoke out against rainforest destruction on Monday in Brazil. Headlining the Ethanol Summit 2009 in Sao Paulo, Clinton spoke of the positive role ethanol could play in lowering carbon emissions, but not when at the expense of rainforest.


Nike, Unilever, Burger King, IKEA may unwittingly contribute to Amazon destruction, says Greenpeace

(06/01/2009) Major international companies are unwittingly driving the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest through their purchases of leather, beef and other products supplied from the Brazil cattle industry, alleges a new report from Greenpeace. The report, Slaughtering the Amazon, is based on a three-year undercover investigation of the Brazilian cattle industry, which accounts for 80 percent of Amazon deforestation and roughly 14 percent of the world's annual forest loss. Greenpeace found that Brazilian beef companies are important suppliers of raw materials used by leading global brands, including Adidas/Reebok, Nike, Carrefour, Eurostar, Unilever, Johnson & Johnson, Toyota, Honda, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, Prada, IKEA, Kraft, Tesco and Wal-Mart, among others.


Chevron faces shareholder rebuke on claims by Amazon rainforest Indians

(05/21/2009) Calpers, the country's largest public pension fund with $170 billion in assets, announced Thursday it will support a resolution calling on Chevron to examine whether it complies with environmental regulations in Ecuador. The move comes as the oil giant faces a potential $27 billion dollar liability for environmental damage caused by Texaco, a company Chevron (NYSE:CVX) acquired in 2001. In court filings Texaco has admitted to dumping and spilling billions of gallons of toxic waste and oil in eastern Ecuador's Amazon rainforest between 1964 and 1990.


Howler monkeys poisoned because of misinformed link to yellow fever

(04/22/2009) There have been numerous reports of howler monkeys poisoned in the southernmost Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul due to misinformation regarding the monkeys and the yellow fever virus. Some locals believed that the monkeys, which also suffer from yellow fever, were in fact the disease-carriers, but yellow fever is carried by mosquitoes not monkeys. A new campaign headed by Dr. Julio Cesar Bicca Marques wants to set the record straight. The campaign, entitled ‘Save Our Guardian Angels’, is working to inform the public of the actual and important role of howler monkeys in yellow fever outbreaks.


New legislation in Brazil opens up road-paving across country, threatening Amazon

(04/21/2009) Brazil’s Chamber of Deputies has approved a measure that would speed up paving roads across the country, including paving a road that environmentalists have long-fought, BR-319. Environmental groups across the nation have warned of widespread deforestation if the measure passes the Senate and is signed by the president.


Mysterious decline of small mammals in Bolivia may be linked to burning Amazon

(04/19/2009) During ten years surveying small mammal populations in Bolivia's cerrado, Dr. Louise Emmons with the Smithsonian Institute found that the mammals were suffering precipitous declines, even local extinctions. After ruling out the usual suspects—local fires, rainfall, and flooding—Emmons formed a novel hypothesis regarding the decline. Could a sudden lack of nighttime dew caused by the burning of the Amazon be the cause of the mammal decline?


Reserves with roads still vital for reducing fires in Brazilian Amazon

(04/08/2009) Analyzing ten years of data from on fires in the Brazilian Amazon, researchers found that roads built through reserves do not largely hamper a reserve's important role in reducing the spread of forest fires. The finding is important as Brazil continues a spree of road-building while at the same time paving over existing roads.


Revolutionary new theory overturns modern meteorology with claim that forests move rain

(04/01/2009) Two Russian scientists, Victor Gorshkov and Anastassia Makarieva of the St. Petersburg Nuclear Physics, have published a revolutionary theory that turns modern meteorology on its head, positing that forests—and their capacity for condensation—are actually the main driver of winds rather than temperature. While this model has widespread implications for numerous sciences, none of them are larger than the importance of conserving forests, which are shown to be crucial to 'pumping' precipitation from one place to another. The theory explains, among other mysteries, why deforestation around coastal regions tends to lead to drying in the interior.


Amazonian region likely to become savannah due to burning, deforestation

(03/31/2009) A new analysis shows that the heavily-deforested Amazonian region of Mato Grosso is particularly susceptible to 'savannization' due to repeated burning that has likely depleted the region's soils of precious nutrients. According to the study, published in the Journal of Geophyscial Research, savannization, or the process of tropical ecosystems shifting to savannah, is likely in northern Mato Grosso even if no further deforestation occurs.


Amazon rainforest in big trouble, says UN

(02/19/2009) Economic development could doom the Amazon warns a comprehensive new report from the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP). The report — titled GEO Amazonia [PDF-21.3MB] — is largely a synthesis of previously published research, drawing upon studies by more than 150 experts in the eight countries that share the Amazon.


Beef consumption fuels rainforest destruction

(02/16/2009) Nearly 80 percent of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon results from cattle ranching, according to a new report by Greenpeace. The finding confirms what Amazon researchers have long known – that Brazil's rise to become the world's largest exporter of beef has come at the expense of Earth's biggest rainforest. More than 38,600 square miles has been cleared for pasture since 1996, bringing the total area occupied by cattle ranches in the Brazilian Amazon to 214,000 square miles, an area larger than France. The legal Amazon, an region consisting of rainforests and a biologically-rich grassland known as cerrado, is now home to more than 80 million head of cattle. For comparison, the entire U.S. herd was 96 million in 2008.


France's Suez liable for illegal deforestation, "dynamite fishing" in the Amazon rainforest

(02/11/2009) A consortium building the Jirau hydroelectric dam in Brazil near the Bolivian border has been ordered to pay roughly $3.5 million in fines for illegally logging nearly 50 acres (18.6 ha) of forest and using dynamite to kill 11 tons of fish in local rivers, reports the Spanish news agency EFE.


Global warming may drive the Amazon rainforest toward seasonal forests rather than savanna

(02/11/2009) Changes in rainfall resulting from climate change may drive the parts of Amazon rainforest toward seasonal forests rather than savanna, argue researchers writing in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences


Brazil to boost spending on infrastructure to counter economic crisis

(02/05/2009) Brazil will increase spending on infrastructure projects by 28 percent to in response to the global financial crisis, reports Bloomberg.


How to save the Amazon rainforest

(01/04/2009) Environmentalists have long voiced concern over the vanishing Amazon rainforest, but they haven't been particularly effective at slowing forest loss. In fact, despite the hundreds of millions of dollars in donor funds that have flowed into the region since 2000 and the establishment of more than 100 million hectares of protected areas since 2002, average annual deforestation rates have increased since the 1990s, peaking at 73,785 square kilometers (28,488 square miles) of forest loss between 2002 and 2004. With land prices fast appreciating, cattle ranching and industrial soy farms expanding, and billions of dollars' worth of new infrastructure projects in the works, development pressure on the Amazon is expected to accelerate. Given these trends, it is apparent that conservation efforts alone will not determine the fate of the Amazon or other rainforests. Some argue that market measures, which value forests for the ecosystem services they provide as well as reward developers for environmental performance, will be the key to saving the Amazon from large-scale destruction. In the end it may be the very markets currently driving deforestation that save forests.


Amazon rainforest damage surges 67% in 2008

(12/20/2008) The area of rainforest in the process of being deforested — razed but not yet cleared — surged in the Brazilian Amazon during 2008, according to new figures released by Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The announcement comes shortly after the Brazilian government reported a 4 percent increase in forest clearing for the year. Using an advanced satellite system that tracks changes in vegetation cover INPE found that 24,932 square kilometers of Amazon forest was damaged between August 2007 and July 2008, an increase of 10,017 square kilometers -- 67 percent -- over the prior year. The figure is in addition to the 11,968 square kilometers of forest that were completely cleared, indicating that at least 36,900 square kilometers of forest were damaged or destroyed during the year. The sum does not include areas that may have been selectively logged for commercial timber.


Agricultural firms cut incentives for Amazon deforestation

(12/02/2008) As grain prices plummet and concerns over cash mount, agricultural giants are cutting loans to Brazilian farmers, reports the Wall Street Journal. Tighter farm credit may be contributing to a recent slowing in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, where agriculture is an increasingly important driver of forest clearing.


Amazon deforestation rises slightly to 4,600 square miles in 2008

(11/28/2008) Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased slightly for the August 2007-July 2008 period, reports the country's National Institute of Space Research (INPE). The rise is the first since 2004 when 27,379 square kilometers were destroyed.


more news


Charts and graphs for the Amazon forest

FOREST LOSS

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Deforestation in the Brazlian Amazon, 1988-present
60-70 percent of deforestation in the Amazon results from cattle ranches while the rest mostly results from small-scale subsistence agriculture. Despite the widespread press attention, large-scale farming (i.e. soybeans) currently contributes relatively little to total deforestation in the Amazon. Most soybean cultivation takes place outside the rainforest in the neighboring cerrado grassland ecosystem and in areas that have already been cleared. Logging results in forest degradation but rarely direct deforestation. However, studies have showed a close correlation between logging and future clearing for settlement and farming.
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Causes of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, 2000-2005
The above pie chart showing deforestation in the Amazon by cause is based on the median figures for estimate ranges. Please note the low estimate for large-scale agriculture. Between 2000-2005 soybean cultivation reesulted in a small overall percentage of direct deforestation. Nevertheless the role of soy is quite significant in the Amazon. As explained by Dr. Philip Fearnside, "Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly. But they have a much greater impact on deforestation by consuming cleared land, savanna, and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier. Soybean farming also provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation by other actors."
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Deforestation in Brazil, 1978-2005

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Deforestation in Amazônia Legal State, Brazil, 1988-2005
Deforestation in Amazônia Legal State, Brazil, 1988-2005 measured stated-by-state by percent share of total forest loss
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Deforestation in Amazônia Legal State, Brazil, 1988-2005
Deforestation in Amazônia Legal State, Brazil, 1988-2005 State-by-state contribution to total forest loss
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Deforestation in Acre State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Amapá State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Amazonas State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Maranhão State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Mato Grosso State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Pará State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Rondônia State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Roraima State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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Deforestation in Tocantins State, Brazil, 1988-2005

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FOREST COVER

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Amazon biomass distribution, by vegetation type
The biomass range (metric tons per hectare) for general vegetation types in the Amazon Basin. The authors report the following distribution of vegetation category for the basin: Old growth terra firme forest (62.3% of the legal Amazon [(8 235 430 sq km]); Floodplain and inundated forest (4.19%); Secondary forest (1.67%); Woodland savanna (24.47%); and Grass/shrub savanna (4.79%). The authors report average biomass ranges as follows: Dense forest 272.5 Mt/ha, Open forest 200.2 Mt/ha, Bamboo forest 212.3 Mt/ha, Liana/dry forest 189.7 Mt/ha, Seasonal/deciduous forest 225.6 Mt/ha, and Varzea flooded forest 248.3 Mt/ha. Image produced by Rhett A. Butler using data from the authors.
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AGRICULTURE
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Soy expansion in the Brazilian Amazon, 1990-2005
Total deforestation and area of soybean cultivation across states in the Brazilian Amazon. Overall soybean cultivation makes up only a small portion of deforestation, though its role is accelerating. Further, soybean expansion and the associated infrastructure development and farmer displacement is driving deforestation by other actors. Note: some soybean farms are established on already degraded rainforest lands and neighboring cerrado ecosystems. Therefore it would be inappropriate to assume the area of soybean planting represents its actual role in deforestation.
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Soy expansion and deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon, 1990-2005
Annual deforestation rates and annual soy expansion for states in the Brazilian Amazon 1990-2005. Note that the 1995-1996 and 1998-1999 years were negative and do not show up on the chart. Graphs based on Brazilian government data.
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Projected soybean exports for the U.S. and Brazil, 2004-2015

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Cattle production in Brazil, 1977-2007

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Production and total supply of cattle in Brazil, 1960-2007

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Soybean oil crush in Brazil, 1981-2006

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Sugar cane production & export for Brazil, 1960-2006

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World soybean production, 1980-2003

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Soy and corn acreage planted and projected in the United States

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Soy and corn acreage planted and projected in the United States

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Forecast world soy trade market share for the U.S. and Brazil, 2004-2016

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World soybean exports, 1990-2015

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Deforestation images

Pictures of deforestation


Expansion of cattle pasture in the Brazilian Amazon, 1998-2003. Courtesy of IPAM

Deforestation hotspots in the Brazilian Amazon, 2001-2004. Courtesy of IPAM
This article was written by Rhett A. Butler [citation]

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