The world's largest tropical rainforest, spread across Brazil, Peru, Colombia and other South American countries. Brazil's "Legal Amazon" region encompasses nine states and 60% of the entire forest. It is home to 28m people and contains roughly 400bn trees.
The Amazon stores roughly five years' worth of global carbon-dioxide emissions. Its trees pull water up through their roots, use it to circulate nutrients, then allow some of it to evaporate through their leaves. Combined with prevailing southwesterly winds, this creates moisture-laden currents which, after hitting the Andes, turn south and dump rain on Brazil's farming heartland. Without this atmospheric aqueduct, much of South America's best farmland would be arid. The flow of water through the Amazon also generates hydroelectricity that meets around two-thirds of Brazil's needs, saving some $660m a year.
One study suggests the Amazon provides around $40,000 of value per square kilometre of standing forest each year, giving it a fair asset value of around $3trn. The World Resources Institute estimated its bioeconomy—the sustainable harvesting of its biodiversity—was worth roughly $2bn in 2020, a pittance relative to the $120bn a year in value the forest generates as a carbon sink. Both can coexist: profits from products such as acai berries depend on preserving the forest.
About a fifth of the Amazon has been destroyed in the past half-century. Before the Trans-Amazonian highway opened in 1972, less than 1% had been cut down. The road was part of Brazil's military dictatorship's strategy to occupy the interior; General Emilio Medici attended its opening, at which a Brazil nut tree was ceremonially chopped down. The dictatorship offered settlers tax breaks and subsidies to set up cattle ranches; indigenous people were often murdered or kidnapped to make way.
From space, deforestation looks like a fish skeleton: motorways form the spine, and land-grabbing creates the ribs. Land-grabbers, known as grileiros (crickets), are named after the practice of putting insects in a box with fraudulent land deeds to age the papers. Putting cattle on seized land has a similar legitimising effect, since Brazil's constitution includes special protection for "productive property".
Scientists worry the forest is now approaching a tipping point beyond which its water-transport system will no longer sustain it. About half of cleared Amazon land is now classed as "degraded pasture"; another 28% is used for typically inefficient cattle ranching. A typical cattle ranch in Para produces fewer than 100 animal units per square kilometre, against around 400 on Brazil's best farms.
IBAMA, Brazil's environmental police, relies on satellite imagery cross-referenced with land ownership and forestry licences to detect illegal clearing. If it determines an environmental crime has been committed, it issues an "embargo" that cuts the area off from rural-credit schemes. Imazon, a think-tank in Belem, estimates that 28% of the Brazilian Amazon has no ownership information; between 2008 and 2012, 40% of deforestation occurred in these unregistered areas.
Under Lula da Silva, deforestation fell by 80% between 2004 and 2012. Under Jair Bolsonaro, it rose again, but never to the levels of the late 1990s—partly thanks to the proliferation of protected areas and an increase in the amount of forest handed to indigenous residents. The World Resources Institute calculates that indigenous-controlled land grew from 75,000 square kilometres in 1985 to 1.1m in 2017 (from less than 1% of Brazil to almost 13%); protected areas rose from 130,000 to 1.3m square kilometres over the same period.
Economists Juliano Assuncao and Jose Alexandre Scheinkman of Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro and Princeton University reckon that a carbon price of $25 per tonne would squeeze out cattle ranchers, since landowners could make more money allowing reforesting. That is a bargain compared with rich countries' mitigation costs: the EU's emissions-trading system charges around EUR80 per tonne.
The Tropical Forests Forever Facility (TFFF), to be launched at COP30 in Belem in November 2025, would endow rainforests through a mooted $25bn capitalisation (Brazil has committed $1bn), leveraged to some $125bn by investing in higher-yielding bonds. It would pay governments that limit deforestation to 0.5% per year, verified by satellite; a fifth of payments must go to indigenous people or "traditional communities". If successful, it would pay around $400 per square kilometre of standing forest per year.
Marina Silva, Brazil's environment minister, says the government is "focusing on the bioeconomy"—combining modern science with traditional knowledge to harvest the forest's biodiversity sustainably. Embrapa, the state agricultural-research agency, now promotes agroforestry systems that mimic the primary rainforest, mixing acai, cacao, black pepper and timber species so that shade-tolerant crops thrive beneath taller canopies. These can be planted on degraded pasture, raising output and biodiversity and storing far more carbon than cattle ranches, but they carry upfront costs and can take decades to bed in.
Mombak, a carbon-credits company whose customers include Microsoft and Google, restores the nutrient profile of soil in degraded pasture, speeding regrowth and increasing carbon sequestration. The Amazon gave the world chocolate and latex.
He thinks by infection, catching an opinion like a cold.