Amazon Rainforest 20% Deforested: Fact Check

The state of Rondônia in western Brazil — once home to 208,000 square kilometers of forest (about 51.4 million acres), an area slightly smaller than the state of Kansas — has become one of the most deforested parts of the Amazon. In the past three decades, clearing and degradation of the state’s forests have been rapid: 4,200 square kilometers cleared by 1978; 30,000 by 1988; and 53,300 by 1998.

The Amazon spans more than 670 million hectares, making it the largest rainforest in the world. 20% of the Amazon biome has been lost already, and it is estimated that 27% will be without trees by 2030 if the current rate of deforestation continues.

The rate of deforestation in Brazil's Amazon fell by nearly 50% in 2023 compared to the previous year, space agency data suggests.

A study based on NASA satellite ... climate. Researchers discovered that in 2004, a peak year for deforestation, over 20% of the forests in the state of Mato Grosso were converted to cropland....

With specialized methodologies and algorithms processed on the Google Earth Engine platform, the study detected a total of 55 million hectares of forest with accessibility and territorial conditions that make it especially vulnerable to destruction, in other words, where the probability of deforestation is higher than zero. This surface area is equal to the sum of all the deforestation that took place in the Amazon from 2001 to 2020, the two-decade period analyzed by 20 specialists from six Amazonian countries who contributed to the study.

In 2024, the Peruvian Amazon lost 141,781 hectares (350,341 acres) of primary forest to deforestation. This total marks the 6th highest on record since 2002. Breaking a record, fires impacted an additional 47,574 hectares (117,554 acres).

Fire - a latent indicator of deforestation as forests are felled and then burned to make way for ranching and farming - can quickly rage out of control. Just in 2019, over 20 million acres of the Amazon were devastated by fires.

In just 50 years, almost 20 percent of the Amazon rainforest has been destroyed. Scientists warn that we’re dangerously close to the forest’s breaking point: 25 percent deforestation.

Beyond this tipping point, the ... to a savannah. According to some studies, this tipping point would be reached when 20% to 25% of the forested area is lost to deforestation....