#rainforests

The growing extraction of rainforest resources is pushing the Amazon and similar biomes towards breaking point, a report has shown. Fresh demands for critical minerals, biofuels and pulp – used in fast fashion, processed food and packaging – are compounding existing pressures from cattle ranching, monocrops, oil and logging, the analysis finds. Mining, in particular, has a far greater environmental footprint than previously thought owing to secondary impacts, such as water pollution and the construction of roads, settlements and other infrastructure development. Between 10% and one-third of the world’s forests are already affected and this proportion is expected to increase. The authors say this highlights an urgent need to replace and reduce the use of products from forest regions, rather than simply adding new forms of consumption, as is currently the case. The report tracks the commodity trends that are threatening forests in the Amazon, the Congo basin and south-east Asia, and weakening their capacity to regulate temperature, store carbon, recycle water and provide a home for nature. Cattle ranching, agriculture and gold mining remain by far the biggest threats, finds the study, which was produced by the Dutch research organisation Profundo and commissioned by Rainforest Foundation Norway. All three are forecast to continue expanding. While the extractive threats of energy, mining and e-commerce are usually examined in isolation, the authors say they need to be understood together as a compounding assault on the world’s forests. “It creates a pressure that the rainforests cannot withstand,” said Ingrid Turgen of the Rainforest Foundation Norway. “Our main message is that this compilation – one on top of the other – is affecting all three rainforest basins (Amazon, Congo and south-east Asia) and if governments don’t do something about it then places like the Amazon face a pretty bleak scenario.”

High in the mountains of Colombia, cloud forests create one of the most biodiverse ecosystems on the planet. Here, the flora, fauna, and fungi of three ecosystems mix together, creating an incredible density of species.

But cattle pasture continues to fragment and degrade this special landscape – a practice dating back to colonial times.

Excerpt:

Scientists once thought it would take a century or more for animals to return to deforested land in the tropics. Now, new research has found ecosystems can recover in mere decades.

“It’s been a huge surprise for all of us,” said Timo Metz, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California, Los Angeles, and first author of the study, published in the journal Nature. “None of us expected it to be so impressive and so quick.”

Rainforests have been disappearing at an alarming pace for at least a century, and millions of acres a year are still burned or cut down for logging, farming or ranching, or are lost to wildfires. In 2024, the rate of loss was as fast as 18 soccer fields per minute, adding up to an area nearly the size of Panama.

At the same time, hundreds of millions of acres of formerly deforested land are thought to be regrowing. Scientists have generally found that it takes more than a century for trees and plants to fully resemble the old, original pristine forest. It was long assumed that animals would take just as long to return.

The new study found that’s not necessarily the case. “The expectation was that the animals would need the forest to come first,” Dr. Metz said. “But surprisingly, many of the animals recover much more quickly than the trees.”

The research project, conducted across two nature reserves in Ecuador, was an enormous undertaking that involved dozens of scientists with wide-ranging specialties.

Australia’s tropical rainforests have become the first in the world to release more carbon than they absorb, in a trend linked to climate change, a study has found. Rainforests are usually regarded as so-called “carbon sinks” as they absorb more emissions than they emit with new trees offsetting the carbon released by dead ones. But a study looking at data from Queensland forests found that…