Tree Huggers

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.sdf.org/post/44051179

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• US banks earned the most globally, making $5.4 billion, with Vanguard, JPMorgan Chase and BlackRock topping the list. In the US, the SEC’s climate-related financial disclosure rules remain suspended, and attempts to pass the FOREST Act, an import regulation like the UK’s law banning imports grown on illegally deforested land, have stalled.

• EU banks generated $3.5 billion, led by BNP Paribas and Rabobank, while UK banks made $1.2 billion, with HSBC, aberdeen Group and Schroders at the top. The EU’s flagship deforestation law, due to enter into application at the end of 2025 has already been delayed by 12-months [...] and remains at risk of additional delays.

• Chinese financial institutions made $1.2 billion, almost entirely from credit-related deals and fees – despite the country’s green finance policy requiring banks to restrict lending for companies with ESG concerns. In China, Green Finance Guidelines introduced in 2022 could be utilised to outline how banks should identify, monitor, prevent and control their environmental, social and governance (ESG) risks. However, China remains the biggest international financier of companies that trade and produce goods linked to deforestation.

• Together, banks in all other countries including Indonesia and Brazil earned $15.9 billion.

• The UK passed a law in 2021 prohibiting the use of products linked to illegally deforested land, but it has yet to come into fully force. Once it does, the Treasury must conduct a review of the UK’s role in financing global deforestation.

cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29027517

Most people probably think that the rainforest of central and west Africa, the second largest in the world, has been around for millions of years. However recent research suggests that it is mostly just 2,000 or so years old. The forest reached roughly its modern state following five centuries of regeneration after it was massively fragmented when the dry season suddenly became longer some 2,500 years ago.

(Older article, but still interesting, and increasingly relevant.)

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Governments are far off track to meet a global target to end deforestation by 2030, according to a progress assessment. Experts say the report is a wake-up call ahead of COP30 next month, which will be the first UN climate summit held in the Amazon rainforest.

At COP26 in 2021, more than 140 countries adopted a pledge, known as the Forest Declaration, to halt and reverse forest loss and land degradation by the end of the decade. Two years later at COP28, all the world’s governments reaffirmed this commitment as part of the first global stocktake of national climate plans.

But on Tuesday, an annual review by NGOs and research institutions showed that, instead of advancing towards the goal, countries will have to close a widening gap in the next five years – as deforestation is 63% higher than where it needs to be to reach zero by 2030.

Source: Forest Declaration Assessment analysis using tree cover loss data (Hansen et al. 2013, updated through 2024) and drivers of tree cover loss (Sims et al. 2025, updated through 2024)

In 2024 alone, the world permanently lost an area of forests roughly the size of England – about 8.1 million hectares. To be on track to stop forest loss by 2030, no more than 5 million hectares should have been deforested globally in 2024, the report says.

“In order to reach zero deforestation by 2030, we would have to cut (forest loss) by 10% each year,” Erin Matson, lead author of the report and a senior consultant at Climate Focus, told journalists. “So far, we are failing to keep pace with that trajectory.”

The report shows that permanent deforestation occurred mostly in the tropics, where old-growth primary forests are being cleared at alarming rates. About 6.7 million hectares were lost in 2024, which released about 3.1 billion metric tonnes of carbon into the atmosphere.

Because of the long timescales over which such high-value forest ecosystems develop, Matson warned that “these carbon and biodiversity-rich forests will not recover in our lifetimes”.

What is driving forest loss?

According to the Forest Declaration Assessment, the main driver for forest loss in the tropics across all regions is the expansion of agriculture, which results in primary forests being converted to permanent pastures or plantations.

A separate 2024 analysis by the World Resources Institute showed cattle has been the main commodity replacing rainforests in key biodiverse regions – including Brazil, which will host COP30 in November.

“Demand for commodities like soy, beef, timber, coal and metals keeps rising – but the tragedy is that we don’t actually need to destroy forests to meet that demand. There are more sustainable production models, but the incentives are completely backwards,” Matson said.

A 2024 report by NGO Global Canopy revealed that a quarter of the top companies and financial institutions exposed to deforestation in their supply chains did not have a policy to prevent forest loss from their activities.

Additionally, in Latin America, wildfires were responsible for a staggering 133% jump in forest loss from the previous year. Fuelled by severe drought, fires in 2024 consumed an area the size of California in the Brazilian Amazon alone – a 66% increase from 2023, according to MapBiomas.

“Major fire years used to be outliers but now they’re the norm. These fires are largely human-made. They’re linked to land clearing, to climate change-induced drought and to limited law enforcement,” Matson added.

Experts told Climate Home in August that the spike in wildfires could threaten forest conservation initiatives in Brazil, including carbon-offsetting projects and state-level forest protection projects in Pará, one of the Brazilian Amazon states with the highest deforestation rates where the COP will take place.

Amazon COP ‘crucial’ for action

As delegates from all countries prepare to gather in the city of Belém for the first UN climate summit held in the Amazon rainforest, experts told Climate Home that clear political signals to reverse the deforestation trend are desperately needed at the midpoint of the Forest Declaration decade.

“This COP30 is extremely crucial for us to move these pledges to actions,” said Sassan Saatchi, founder of the non-profit CTrees and a former NASA scientist.

“The nice thing about COP30 being in Belém is that there is a recognition that the Global South has really come forward to say: ‘We are going to solve the climate problem, even though we may not have been historically the cause of this climate change’,” Saatchi added.

Brazil pledges $1bn in first contribution to COP30 rainforest fund

Brazil has vowed to place rainforests at the centre of the upcoming climate conference, and has proposed a flagship new initiative called the Tropical Forest Forever Facility (TFFF) – a new fund to finance forest protection in tropical countries by leveraging the financial markets.

Many countries have backed Brazil’s push to raise more funding for forest protection, as the TFFF has been endorsed by the BRICS group of large emerging economies and a coalition of 34 nations behind a new forest finance framework including potential TFFF donors like Norway, Japan, the UK and Canada.

Still, Matson urged countries to work on improving and fully implementing their forest policies, rather than taking on new commitments at COP30. “COP is just where things get showcased, but it’s not where the work actually happens, beyond the negotiating room,” she said.

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Global deforestation hasn’t slowed in any significant way in the four years since 127 countries pledged to halt and reverse forest loss and degradation by 2030. The newly published 2025 Forest Declaration Assessment shows that nations are 63% off track from meeting their zero-deforestation target.

To be on track for that goal, deforestation was supposed to drop by 10% every year, capping out at 5 million hectares (12.4 million acres) worldwide in 2024. However, roughly 8.1 million hectares (20 million acres) were cleared globally that year, a negligible change from the 2018–2020 baseline of 8.3 million hectares (20.5 million acres), the report found.

“Every year, the gap between commitments and reality grows wider,” Erin Matson, the assessment’s lead author and a consultant for Netherlands-based research think tank Climate Focus, said in a statement. “Forests are non-negotiable infrastructure for a livable planet.”

By the end of 2025, the target is for no more than 4.1 million hectares (10.1 million acres), meaning that to get back on track, the global deforestation rate would need to fall by half in a year.

Mid-year estimates show that’s unlikely. Data from Brazil’s space institute, INPE, show there were deforestation alerts issued for 209,000 hectares (about 516,500 acres) in the Amazon Rainforest between January and June 2025, 27% higher than in 2024. However, analysts expect the rate to slow as Brazil implements antideforestation policies, ranging from cattle tracking to creating protected areas.

According to the report, the target for primary forest loss is even further off track, missed by 190% in 2024. The rate of deforestation has almost doubled since the 2018-2020 baseline. Much of that deforestation was driven by fires in the Amazon Basin, the result of a strong El Niño and historic drought conditions in the region.

The assessment found that financing for forest protection and restoration also fell short. Public financing reached an average of $5.9 billion per year, far below the estimated $117 billion to $299 billion needed to achieve zero deforestation by 2030. Over the same period, large-scale industrial agriculture received an estimated $409 billion in annual subsidies.

The stakes are high for the upcoming U.N. climate summit in Belém in the Brazilian Amazon. Nations need to move from commitments to concrete action, Matson said in a video press call.

“What happens in the next five years will have a huge impact on the livability of our planet,” she said. “We need global leaders to make forest protection nonnegotiable because our collective prosperity and well-being depend on it.”

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• A new analysis from the Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program shows differences in mining patterns in the central and northern departments of the country, compared with southern departments like Madre de Dios.
• The mapping analysis is one of the first visualizations of Peru’s mining problem on a nationwide scale.
• The organization called for a better gold traceability system and for small-scale and artisanal mining activities to be subject to stricter environmental oversight.

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• Some agricultural producers in the Brazilian Cerrado who indirectly supply soy to the European market still haven’t complied with the forthcoming European Union’s antideforestation regulation, or EUDR, an investigation has found.
• Two companies, Mizote Group and Franciosi Agro, have cleared 986 hectares (2,436 acres) since May 2024, advocacy group Earthsight found, including forested areas — meaning any of the soy grown isn’t EUDR-compliant.
• The Cerrado, a biodiverse savanna, is the Brazilian biome most vulnerable to deforestation driven by agricultural expansion, losing more than 652,000 ha (1.6 million acres) of native vegetation in 2024.
• The EUDR and voluntary certification schemes like the Roundtable on Responsible Soy (RTRS) aim to root out deforestation from supply chains — but the latter has limitations, while implementation of the former risks being delayed by another year.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29014478

“Extreme” wildfires emitted more than 8bn tonnes of carbon dioxide during the 2024-25 “global fire season”, according to a new report.

The annual “state of wildfires” report from an international team of scientists finds that fires burned at least 3.7m square kilometres of land – an area larger than India – between March 2024 and February 2025.

This is almost 10% below the average annual area burned over the past two decades.

But, due to an increase in wildfires in carbon-rich forests, the CO2 emissions resulting from these fires were almost 10% above average.

The report also zooms in on four of the most prominent extreme wildfire events during this time: southern California; north-east Amazonia; South America’s Pantanal-Chiquitano region; and the Congo Basin.

All of these events were found to have been more likely to occur as a result of human-caused climate change.

The researchers identify that, in some cases, the area burned by these fires was 25-35 times larger than it would have been without global warming.

The report also estimates that more than 100 million people around the world were exposed to wildfires in 2024 and 2025.

These fires are “reshaping lives, economies and ecosystems on a global scale”, one of the report authors, Dr Carmen Steinmann from ETH Zürich, said in a statement.

‘Increasing extent and severity’

Scientists from dozens of institutions analyse “extreme wildfires” globally between March 2024 and February 2025 in the second annual edition of the report.

The report explains that the “March-February definition of the global fire season latest global fire season is chosen so as to align with an annual lull in the global fire calendar in the boreal spring months”.

According to the report, the authors “harness‬‭ and‬‭ adopt‬‭ new‬‭ methodologies‬‭ brought‬‭ forward‬‭ by‬‭ the‬‭ scientific‬‭ community”. They add that in future reports, they hope to “enhance the tools presented in this report to predict extremes with increasing lead times, monitor emerging situations in near-real time and explain their causes rapidly”.

In the report’s “summary for policymakers”, study author Dr Matthew Jones, from the University of East Anglia, says:

“[The report] focuses on the global extreme wildfire events of the global fire season, explains why they happened and fingerprints the role of climate change as one of the key drivers of changing wildfire risk globally.”

The authors aim to “deliver actionable information” to policy experts and wider society about wildfires, the report says.

Using satellite data, the authors find that 3.7m square kilometres (km2) of land burned globally between March 2024 and February 2025. This means that the 2024-25 fire season ranks 16th out of all fire seasons since 2002, indicating below-average burned area compared to the rest of the 21st century.

However, the global fire emissions database shows that the 2024-25 wildfire season drove more than 8bn tonnes of CO2 emissions, according to the report. This is 10% above the average of wildfire seasons since 2002.

Jones explains that this is indicative of a trend towards “increasing extent and severity of fire in global forests, which are carbon-rich”, as opposed to less carbon-rich grassland biomes.

The chart below shows global burned area (top) and carbon emissions (bottom) during the 2024-25 wildfire season, compared to the average over 2002-24, for different world regions. Red bars indicate that the 2024-25 wildfire season had higher-than-average burned area or emissions for the given region, while blue indicates lower-than-average numbers.

Burned area, in thousands of km2 (top) and carbon emissions in teragrams (equivalent to millions of tonnes) of carbon (bottom) during the 2024-25 wildfire season, compared to the 2002-24 average, for different world regions and biomes. The triangles (right y-axis) indicate the percentage of the relative anomaly compared to the average. Source: Kelley et al. (2025)

Savannas, grasslands and shrublands account for more than 80% of the burned area in a typical year, with forests and croplands making up the rest.

According to the report, burned area in tropical and subtropical grasslands, savannah and shrublands‬‭ was 10% below the 2002-24 average over 2024-25, but still contributed 70% towards the total global burned area.

The 2024-25 wildfire season was the second consecutive year that African‬‭ savannahs‬‭ “experienced‬‭ a‬‭ low‬‭ fire‬‭ season”, the report notes, with below average burned area and carbon emissions.

Meanwhile, the report finds that the greatest increases in burned area and carbon emissions during the 2024-25 wildfire season were seen in the ‭Canada’s boreal‬‭ forests‬‭, the‬‭ moist‬‭ tropical‬‭ forests‬‭ in‬‭ the Amazon region, the‬‭ Chiquitano‬‭ dry‬‭ forests‬‭ of‬‭ Bolivia and the Cerrado – a tropical savannah in central Brazil.

The graphic below shows some key figures from the 2024-25 wildfire season.

Key figures from the 2024-25 wildfire season. Source: State of wildfires project, summary for policymakers (2025).

Study author Dr Douglas Kelley, from the UK Centre for Ecology and Hydrology, told a press briefing that the author team spent time “actively engaging with a big regional panel of experts”.

The team identified four “focal events” – extreme wildfire events that were chosen both for the severity of the fire and the impacts on people and the environment.

For each focal point, the study authors assessed the drivers of the wildfire. They also used attribution – a field of climate science that aims to identify the “fingerprint” of climate change on an extreme event – to determine the contribution of human-caused climate change.

Finally, the authors estimated the likelihood of similar events occurring in the future as the climate continues to warm over the coming century.

Kelley told the press briefing that “capturing fires themselves can be quite tricky”, because they are affected by a range of different factors.

The report notes that wildfires are affected by changes in weather, with hot and dry weather providing the best conditions for wildfires. It adds that changes in land use are also important, as they can affect ignition.

Kelley explained that the report authors used “multiple types of attribution” to capture these different factors, using a range of fire models, weather forecasting models and land use data.

North America

In North America, 2024-25 was an “extreme” fire year, the report says.

Both burned area and carbon emissions reached their second-highest levels since records began in 2002 and 2003, respectively. Across the continent, the burned area was 35% higher than the average since 2002 and the carbon emissions were more than double the average emissions since 2003.

In Canada, 46,000km2 of land burned during the 2024-25 fire season, releasing 282m tonnes of carbon (Mt). The burned area was 85% higher than average, but the associated emissions were more than 200% higher than average, according to the report.

The report also notes that the wildfire season started early in Canada in 2024, due to earlier-than-normal snowmelt, as well as persistent, multiyear drought and “holdover fires” that reignited in the spring after smouldering through the winter months.

In the US, more than 64,000 individual wildfires contributed to a total burned area larger than 36,000km2. More than 8,000 wildfires in Mexico led to a record 16,500km2 of burned area.

The regions experiencing record or near-record burned area and carbon emissions were varied: from the Canadian tundra and the north-western US mountain ranges to California’s grasslands and Mexico’s tropical forests. In the far-northern boreal forest – which contains around 20% of the world’s forest carbon – the season trailed only the record-breaking 2023-24 fire season in burned area and associated emissions.

The researchers select the January 2025 southern California wildfires as one of the four “focal events” of the report.

The maps below show the locations of the four focal events: southern California, the Congo Basin, north-east Amazonia and the Pantanal-Chiquitano. The colours show the percentage difference from the average burned area, with blue indicating less burned area than average and darker browns showing more burned area.

The burned area anomaly, expressed as a percentage difference from the 2002-24 average, for each of four focal events (clockwise from top left): southern California, Congo Basin, Pantanal-Chiquitano and north-east Amazonia. The inset on each chart shows the location of the event. Blue colours indicate negative anomalies (less burned area than usual) and browns indicate positive anomalies. Source: Kelley et al. (2025)

In early January 2025, more than a dozen fires broke out in and around Los Angeles. Although January is “well outside the typical fire period”, the fires “became the most expensive wildfires ever recorded in just a few short days”, Prof Crystal Kolden – a study author and the director of the University of California, Merced’s Fire Resilience Center – wrote in the report.

The two largest fires, named the Palisades fire and the Eaton fire, resulted in at least 30 deaths, more than 11,500 homes destroyed and more than 153,000 people being evacuated from their homes.

The fires resulted in estimated economic losses of $140bn, placing “substantial pressure on the already volatile home insurance market in California”, according to the report. It notes that the fires also contributed to the “housing and affordability crisis” in southern California.

The report says that the severity of the January fires was largely due to intensifying extremes in the water cycle – an unusually wet period that allowed vegetation to flourish, followed by an unusually arid winter that dried out that vegetation, turning it into fuel. It notes:

“Between 5 and 25 January, favourable weather, fuel availability and ignition sources aligned, leading to create ideal conditions for ignition and rapid fire spread.

“The substantial suppression efforts deployed is unaccounted for in our modelling framework and could be one of the possible reasons the fires did not escalate even further.”

Previous attribution analysis found that the January 2025 fires were “likely influenced” by human-driven climate change. The report authors also find that the burned area in the southern California event was 25 times greater due to climate change.

However, whether extreme fire activity in southern California continues to intensify depends largely on how the region’s plants and trees respond to increased atmospheric CO2, the report says. It also notes that climate models disagree as to whether wintertime rainfall will increase or decrease in future climates.

South America

The report finds that South America had a total area burned by wildfires of 120,000km2 during the 2024-25 fire season – 35% higher than average.

That translated into the release of 263Mt of carbon – the “highest carbon emissions on record for the continent” and 84% above average, the report says.

Jones, a study author, said in a press briefing that South America “hasn’t seen carbon emissions like this on record before”.

The report underlines that South America’s fire season was “unprecedented” in many ways, such as fire extent, emission levels, intensity and their impacts on society and the environment, although not in the number of fires.

For example, fires in the north-east Amazon impacted air quality, crops, houses and native vegetation, affecting people living in the region, including Indigenous peoples such as the Yanomami, the report says.

Laercio Fernandes, a volunteer firefighter and Indigenous man, holds a shell of a turtle found dead after a forest fire hit the Kadiwéu Indigenous land, in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil, in 2024. Credit: Diego Cardoso / Alamy Stock Photo

The country with the largest area burned by wildfires during the 2024-25 fire season was Brazil, with a total burned area of 243,000km2, followed by Bolivia, with a total of 107,000km2 of burned area, and Venezuela, with a total of 43,000km2 of burned area.

The most-affected biomes in the region were the Amazon rainforest, with 47,000km2 of wildfires above the average since 2002.

Second was the Chiquitano and Chaco dry forests – encompassing parts of Bolivia, Brazil, Paraguay and Argentina. These biomes experienced a “record-breaking” fire season with more than 46,000km2 of burned area. These fires resulted in 100Mt of carbon emissions – six times higher than the average since 2003.

More than 46,000km2 of the Pantanal – the largest tropical wetland located in Brazil, Bolivia and Paraguay – burned in 2024-25, with associated carbon emissions of 67Mt above the average.

According to the report, fire activity in the region was primarily driven by “anomalous dry weather”.

In the north-eastern Amazon, the severity of the fire season between January and April 2024 was compounded by natural sources of climate variability, such as El Niño and the Atlantic Meridional Mode, which contributed to very high temperatures and absence of rainfall. There, deep soil moisture dropped to 1%.

Meanwhile, in Pantanal and Chiquitano, “extreme dry weather” since 2023 and “multiple years of below-average rainfall” contributed to the severe fires, the report says. Study author Dr Francesca Di Giuseppe said in a briefing that the “wet season that usually happens between February and May failed completely to recharge the soil that kept completely dry and this drove most of the fire season” in the region.

The authors conduct an attribution analysis and find that the fire weather conditions in the north-eastern Amazon that season were “significantly more likely” due to climate change. In the Pantanal and Chiquitano, the conditions were 4.2-5.5 times more likely due to climate change.

Africa

Overall, the scale of fires across Africa was “well-below average” in 2024 and 2025, the report finds, except in certain areas, including the Congo Basin, northern Angola and South Africa.

In 2024, a record-high amount of land was burned in the Congo Basin – a biodiverse region in central Africa spanning six countries that holds the world’s second-largest tropical forest. This burned area was 28% higher than the annual average and there were 4,000 fires in total, 20% more than usual, in 2024.

Fires also caused “hazardous” air pollution and contributed to the Congo Basin’s highest loss of primary forest in a decade.

The analysis in the report finds that it is “virtually certain” that human-caused climate change contributed to the extreme fire weather in this region in July and August 2024.

The hot, dry and windy conditions were 3-8 times more likely to occur as a result of climate change and the area scorched by fires was three times greater than it would have been otherwise, the findings show.

Climate change has also driven an increase of more than 50% in the average annual burned area in the Congo Basin, which the researchers say is “one of the most robust signals of climate influence” in the fire trends they analysed.

Drought was a major factor behind the fires, the report finds, and water stress is expected to be the main driver shaping future fires in the Congo Basin.

Congo rainforest along Rembo Ngowe river in Akaka, Loango National Park, Gabon. Credit: Lee Dalton / Alamy Stock Photo.

These fires are “part of a long-term trend of increasing fire encroachment into African moist forests, driven by climate change and human pressure”, says Prof Michael Wimberly, a professor at the University of Oklahoma who was not involved in the report, but has researched wildfires in Africa. He tells Carbon Brief:

“The increased fire activity in the Congo Basin is troubling because of the vast expanses of unfragmented forests and peatlands that store massive amounts of carbon, provide habitat for threatened species and supply vital resources to local populations.”

The report notes that there is “sparse reporting and poor media coverage” on the impacts of fires in the Congo Basin in 2024, despite millions of people being impacted.

In South Africa, 34 people were killed and thousands of livestock and homes were destroyed in fires last year. In Ivory Coast, 23 people were killed and 50km2 of land was burned.

Dr Glynis Humphrey, a postdoctoral research fellow at the University of Cape Town, who was not involved in the study, adds that a below-average burned area across Africa “does not necessarily indicate a decline in fire risk or impact”. She tells Carbon Brief:

“In some ecosystems, fewer but more intense fires are being observed, which can still have severe ecological and atmospheric consequences.”

Using climate models, the researchers project that fires to the extent of those in the Congo Basin last year could occur up to 50% more often by 2100, under a medium-emissions pathway.

The region is also projected to see more increases in extreme wildfire risk by the end of this century. Gabon, Equatorial Guinea and the central part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo could see some of the largest increases in burned area, which, the report estimates, could double or quadruple in some cases.

Humphrey notes that fire patterns are “shifting” in response to climate change, which is “leading to significant consequences for ecosystems that don’t typically burn – like the forests in the Congo Basin”. She tells Carbon Brief:

“This is of concern, as primary forests harbour critical biodiversity that supports ecosystem functioning and provide services to people…These forests are also sanctuaries for endangered species.”

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/29013847

Could the boreal forest be less fragile than we think? Contrary to the predictions of models that forecast its rapid decline in favour of temperate maple forests, the ecological history of the boreal forest is showing surprising resilience.

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At least three people have been killed in Ecuador as the government further ramps up its use of force against Indigenous-led protests triggered in part by crackdowns on environmentalists, according to civil society and human rights groups.

Inside Climate News previously reported that the Noboa administration has arrested, detained or frozen the bank accounts of 61 leaders of Ecuadorian environmental, Indigenous and human rights organizations.

the 61 leaders work on programs that collectively protect at least 35 million hectares of Ecuadorian and Peruvian Amazon rainforest. The leaders are also working to restore an additional 8.7 million hectares and represent 1,500 Amazonian Indigenous communities in Ecuador.

The most pressing question of our time deals with how to mitigate climate degradation. One solution is to expand woodlands dramatically and leave them to their natural processes.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28653579

The study and a couple of its main points:

• Billions in pledged finance has not made it to the ground level of Africa’s Great Green Wall.

• Only two of 36 assessed reforestation plots demonstrate significant greening since planting.

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• Satellite data and reports from the ground show how a rapid expansion of smallholder cacao farming in southeastern Liberia is causing “alarming” deforestation.
• Large numbers of migrant workers from Côte D’Ivoire have been invited into Liberia by community leaders looking set up cacao plantations.
• Liberia’s remote southeast is one of its most densely forested regions, and also one of its poorest.
• Cacao grown in these new plantations would likely run afoul of new EU regulations barring deforestation-linked commodities, which the bloc is considering delaying.

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• Peruvian authorities are backing a highway project that would cut through 5,400 hectares (more than 13,300 acres) of the largely preserved ancestral territory of the Shawi Nation.
• The road will connect the departments of Loreto and San Martín, threatening sensitive and biodiverse ecosystems, including unique white-sand forests and montane forests, and critical water sources.
• Indigenous leaders say the road will open up their territory not only to mining interests but also to an expansion of illegal coca cultivation, which is already growing in the region.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28580655

In 2024, the Amazon Rainforest underwent its most devastating forest fire season in more than two decades. According to a new study by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, the fire-driven forest degradation released an estimated 791 million metric tons of carbon dioxide in 2024, a sevenfold increase compared with the previous two years.

The carbon emissions from fires in 2024 surpassed those from deforestation for the first time on record. Brazil was the largest contributor, accounting for 61% of these emissions, followed by Bolivia with 32%, the study found.

“The escalating fire occurrence, driven by climate change and unsustainable land use, threatens to push the Amazon towards a catastrophic tipping point,” the authors write. “Urgent, coordinated efforts are crucial to mitigate these drivers and to prevent irreversible ecosystem damage.”

The researchers estimated that the total emissions from deforestation and fire-driven degradation in the Amazon in 2024 was 1,416 million metric tons of CO2. This is higher than Japan’s CO2 emissions in 2022, which ranked fifth after China, the U.S., India and Russia.

The 2023-24 Amazon drought was one of the most severe in recent history, fueled by the El Niño phenomenon, which causes lower rainfall in the region. Water levels in the Amazon’s main rivers, including the Solimões, Negro and Madeira, dropped to their lowest in more than 120 years.

Human-driven climate change has in fact made the Amazon Rainforest nearly 30 times more prone to fire, the 2023-24 State of Wildfires report found.

However, most blazes in 2024 would have likely been started by humans engaging in arson. Ane Alencar, director of science at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute, previously told Mongabay contributor Lucas Berti that in 2024, the dry, flammable forest became an opportunity for those wanting to deforest illegally.

According to the new study, fires affected 3.3 million hectares (8.2 million acres) of Amazon forest last year alone. The estimate is less than that of a Brazil-based government figure, which put the number at 6.7 million hectares (16.6 million acres) in 2024 just for Brazil.

Facilitated by the large swaths of burned forest, deforestation in 2025 has also been rising after a historic drop of 31% from 2023 to 2024. Monthly deforestation data in Brazil showed an increase of 92% of deforestation in May compared with the same month in 2024. A midyear review suggested that deforestation alerts increased by 27% from January to June over the previous year.

“With a worsening of climate change and the greater fragility of forest cover, including primary cover, we are beginning to see a shift,” João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary for Brazil’s Environment Ministry, said in June 2025.

“The tropical forest, which is naturally immune to large fires due to its humidity, is suffering a huge impact from climate change, reducing its resistance to fires and becoming more vulnerable,” he added.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28569525

Two years ago, Ecuador surprised the world with a historic referendum: more than 58% of the population voted to keep nearly one billion barrels of crude oil underground in Yasuní National Park – one of the most biodiverse places on Earth and home to Indigenous Peoples living in voluntary isolation (Tagaeri and Taromenane). The referendum was a triumph of democracy and a global example of how a society can choose to protect life over oil.

Yet, little has changed since then: by August 2024, only one of the 247 wells in Block 43 had been closed. The referendum mandated that oil operations cease within a year, but the government has announced it will take five.

Today, new threats are emerging, and the Ecuadorian people’s decision remains unfulfilled. President Daniel Noboa is pushing forward the largest oil auction in decades: 2.3 million hectares divided into 14 blocks that overlap with the territories of seven Indigenous nations (Sapara, Shiwiar, Waorani, Kichwa, Achuar, Shuar, and Andoa) in the Amazon rainforest. This extractivist shift is not only an ecological contradiction – given that humanity has already crossed seven of the nine planetary boundaries and the Amazon is nearing a tipping point – but also deepens Ecuador’s political and social crisis, which extends from the streets to financial markets in the Global North. It is part of an ambitious plan to boost investment in the hydrocarbon sector, which includes 49 new projects worth $47 billion.

To make this plan viable, the Noboa administration is promoting regressive economic measures and legislation that restricts social protest while weakening both judicial independence and environmental governance. Territorial leaders who oppose oil expansion face an increasingly repressive state apparatus. There is even talk of constitutional changes that would prioritize greater guarantees for investors at the expense of collective rights, such as free, prior, and informed consent, and the rights of nature itself.

Oil expansion in Ecuador is not an isolated phenomenon and cannot be understood without examining international markets. In a recent report, co-authored by Amazon Watch, we exposed how more than 190 oil, gas, and coal companies are expanding their operations across Latin America and the Caribbean, backed by banks and investors from the United States and Europe. Although science has made it clear that opening new oil fields is incompatible with global climate goals, since the adoption of the Paris Agreement more than 930,000 km² have been opened for oil and gas exploration in the region – an area larger than Venezuela.

The dilemma runs deeper: can there be true democracy in societies whose economies remain tied to oil extraction in Indigenous and ecologically rich territories? The Yasuní referendum proved that another path is possible. The challenge now is ensuring that this sovereign decision is not buried under oil decrees, regressive reforms, and investor deals.

What is at stake is not only Ecuador’s Amazon. A just energy transition must begin from the principle of shared but differentiated responsibility. The upcoming COP30 in Brazil will be a decisive test: will governments commit to declaring the Amazon a fossil-free region, or allow it to become a sacrifice zone? We hope they choose intergenerational and interspecies well-being over short-term profit.

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Police in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, will be paid bonuses for killing suspects. Aimed at organized crime, the law will hit ethnic minorities - and eco-activists.

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cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/28543694

An unexpected region of the Amazon is at the forefront of rapid growth in climate extremes, a new report reveals.

The central north Amazon, a region with extensive areas of high forest cover, natural savannas and vast indigenous territories, was not previously considered as being the most affected by climate change.

The report, launched to coincide with COP 30, the first COP to be held in the Amazon, identifies Amazonia as experiencing rapid growth in extreme temperatures and water stress – with 10% of the basin witnessing dry season increases in extreme temperatures of at least 0.77°C a decade and more than 3.31°C since 1981.

The findings reveal that climate extremes in the Amazon have been getting increasingly worse over the last 43 years. These changes are not apparent in assessments of average temperatures, which are rising at 0.21°C a decade and are in line with the global average warming.

Scientists fear that if these rapid increases in incidence of climate extremes continue it could risk pushing the Amazon past critical thresholds.

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• The five Mekong countries lost nearly 1 million hectares (2.5 million acres) of tree cover in 2024, with nearly a quarter of which was primary forest, and more than 30% of losses occurring inside protected areas.
• Cambodia and Laos saw some of the highest levels of loss inside protected areas, driven by logging, plantations and hydropower projects, though both countries recorded slight declines from 2023.
• In Myanmar, conflict has complicated forest governance, with mining and displacement contributing to losses, though overall deforestation fell slightly compared to the previous year.
• Thailand and Vietnam bucked the regional trend, with relatively low forest losses in protected areas, supported by logging bans, reforestation initiatives, and stricter law enforcement.

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• The Roundtable on Sustainable Palm Oil has dismissed allegations that Indonesian conglomerate First Resources Ltd. Controls a network of shadow companies, despite evidence presented by NGOs linking these firms to deforestation, peatland destruction, river pollution and labor abuses.
• The decision by RSPO has triggered outrage among NGOs that say it exposes a loophole that lets corporate groups hide destructive operations behind undeclared affiliates while keeping their sustainability credentials intact.
• FRL told Mongabay it recognized transparency concerns but emphasized that the panel “did not find evidence of hidden operations or deliberate concealment.”

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/37021979

It’s a sacred sanctuary for bisons, wolves and countless birds. The Białowieża Forest is the last untouched forest in Europe. Not a single tree has ever been cut down there. Located between Poland and Belarus, it fascinates scientists and nature lovers alike.

I received this PDF in a batch file transfer from someone, and it is not at all relevant to where I live, but I have located the same PDF online and share it here so that it may be of use to others (particularly those in North America).

Brazil’s antitrust regulator, CADE, on Sept. 30 decided to suspend the Amazon soy moratorium from Jan. 1, 2026. Depending on the probe’s course of action, this could dismantle one of the nation’s most important private sector pacts credited with slowing deforestation of the tropical rainforest for soy plantations.

Initiated in 2006, the Amazon soy moratorium is an agreement between soy traders, industry groups and environmental organizations to not purchase soy grown on land in the Amazon cleared after 2008. Its signatories include commodity-trading giants Cargill, Bunge, Cofco and Louis Dreyfus. CADE suspended the moratorium in August this year, but a federal court reinstated it one week later.

At a hearing on Sept. 30, CADE’s councilors voted 4-2 to postpone the suspension by three months until Dec. 21, 2025. The two in favor wanted an immediate suspension. According to José Levi, a CADE councilor who supported the delay, the three-month window would allow time for private parties and public officials to engage in dialogue.

CADE president Gustavo Augusto said at the hearing that the decision is focused on preventing unilateral decisions by multinational companies. “We cannot allow foreign multinationals to regulate a product essential to human life, because we are talking about food. Soy is protein … meat depends on soy.”

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cross-posted from: https://lemmy.myserv.one/post/21841057

The Trump administration has said it will rescind Bill Clinton’s roadless rule, more than two decades after its introduction appeared to mark the end of the bitter battle between environmentalists and loggers over the future of America’s best remaining woodland.

The rule is “overly restrictive” and an “absurd obstacle” to development, according to Brooke Rollins, Trump’s secretary of agriculture, as she outlined its demise in June. The administration is in a hurry – an unusually short public comment period of 21 days for this rescission has just ended, following a Trump “emergency” order to swiftly fell trees across the US’s network of national forests, spanning 280 million acres.

“We are freeing up our forests so we are allowed to take down trees and make a lot of money,” Trump has said. “We have massive forests. We just aren’t allowed to use them because of the environmental lunatics who stopped us.”

The group intends to travel more than 3,000 kilometers to denounce the impacts of agribusiness on the Amazon and Cerrado and to oppose the construction of the Ferrogrão railway – planned to connect northern Mato Grosso to Pará.

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