Drought, fires, deforestation battered Amazon rainforest in 2024

2024 was a brutal year for the Amazon rainforest, with rampant wildfires and extreme drought ravaging large parts of a biome that’s a critical counterweight to climate change.

2024 was a brutal year for the Amazon rainforest, with rampant wildfires and extreme drought ravaging large parts of a biome that's a critical counterweight to climate change.

A warming climate fed drought that in turn fed the worst year for fires since 2005. And those fires contributed to deforestation, with authorities suspecting some fires were set to more easily clear land to run cattle.

The Amazon is twice the size of India and sprawls across eight countries and one territory, storing vast amounts of carbon dioxide that would otherwise warm the planet.

It has about 20 per cent of the world's fresh water and astounding biodiversity, including 16,000 known tree species. But governments have historically viewed it as an area to be exploited, with little regard for sustainability or the rights of its Indigenous peoples, and experts say exploitation by individuals and organised crime is rising at alarming rates.

“The fires and drought experienced in 2024 across the Amazon rainforest could be ominous indicators that we are reaching the long-feared ecological tipping point,” said Andrew Miller, advocacy director at Amazon Watch, an organisation that works to protect the rainforest. “Humanity's window of opportunity to reverse this trend is shrinking, but still open.” There were some bright spots. The level of Amazonian forest loss fell in both Brazil and Colombia. And nations gathered for the annual United Nations conference on biodiversity agreed to give Indigenous peoples more say in nature conservation decisions.

“If the Amazon rainforest is to avoid the tipping point, Indigenous people will have been a determinant factor," Miller said.

Forest loss in Brazil's Amazon — home to the largest swath of this rainforest — dropped 30.6 per cent compared to the previous year, the lowest level of destruction in nine years. The improvement under leftist President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva contrasted with deforestation that hit a 15-year high under Lula's predecessor, far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro, who prioritised agribusiness expansion over forest protection and weakened environmental agencies.