In 40 years, Amazon lost vegetation the size of France
The way humans have occupied the Amazon over the past 40 years has accelerated the threat to the ability of the world’s largest rainforest to contribute to the planet’s balance. A new MapBiomas study on land use found the biome lost 52 million hectares of native vegetation from 1985 to 2024.
The area converted for human use during this time range represents 13 percent of the territory occupied by the biome and is equivalent to the size of France. Added to what had already been affected, the Amazon by 2024 had lost 18.7 percent of its native vegetation, of which 15.3 percent was occupied by human activities.
“The Brazilian Amazon is approaching the 20–25 percent range predicted by science as the possible point of no return for the biome,” MapBiomas researcher Bruno Ferreira warned.
The speed of land cover conversion over the last 40 years is striking, with 83 percent of all native vegetation cleared. During this time span, green cover gave way to various activities – such as livestock farming, agriculture, forestry of exotic species, and mining.
Pastures, for instance, occupied 12.3 million hectares in the Amazon in 1985. By 2024, this land use already covered 56.1 million hectares of the biome. Agriculture further advanced, occupying an area 44 times larger than 40 years ago. From 180 thousand hectares at the beginning of the time series, it soared to 7.9 million hectares in 2024.
Proportionally, the presence of forestry in the biome increased further – by 110 times – jumping from 3,200 to 352 thousand hectares in the period. Mining also follows an upward curve, with a leap from 26 thousand to 444 thousand hectares in the same four decades.
Soybean moratorium
Also striking is the presence of soybean farming as the main type of crop in the biome, with 74.4 percent of the total area occupied by agriculture in the Amazon, totaling 5.9 million hectares in 2024.
In examining this time span, the experts focused on the evolution of soybean farming in the region from the perspective of the soy moratorium – a trade agreement that bans the purchase of these crops grown in areas deforested in the biome after 2008.
Most of the use of land for soybeans in the Amazon occurred after the deadline of the trade agreement, when 4.3 million hectares began to be used for this type of crop. According to the study, despite the expansion in this land use, most of it – 3.8 million hectares of crops – grew on land that had previously been converted to pasture or other types of agriculture.
From 2008 to 2024, the conversion of forest formation directly into soybean crops reached 769 thousand hectares.
Droughts
According to the study, these activities occupied mainly forests – the vegetation most affected. Throughout the period, 49.1 million hectares were cleared, adding up to nearly 95 percent of the total native vegetation removed.
“We can already see some of the impacts of this loss of forest cover, such as in the biome’s wetlands. Maps of the Amazon’s land cover and land use show that it is drier,” says Bruno Ferreira.
The analysis points to a 2.6 million–hectare decline in water-covered areas in the Amazon from 1985 to 2024. These are forests and floodplains, apicums (hypersaline areas adjacent to mangroves), and drier mangroves, which saw a further retraction in the last decade, when eight of the ten driest years in the biome were recorded.
Regeneration
In 2024, two percent of the remaining green cover in the Amazon consists of secondary vegetation. This percentage accounts for 6.9 million hectares in the biome of previously converted areas that have not been deforested again and have entered a process of regeneration.
This type of vegetation was less affected by deforestation last year, when 88 percent of deforestation in the biome occurred in primary vegetation and 12 percent represented the removal of green cover undergoing regeneration.
