From the foothills of the Andes in Ecuador the largest tropical forest on earth stretches more than 3,500km – more than the distance from Galway to Moscow – before spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. It took Spaniard Franciso de Orellana more than eight months to descend the full length of the great river when his party became the first Europeans to do so in 1542.
The accounts of Orellana’s improbable adventure chronicled a jungle that was then inhabited by a large population, possibly as many as five million in total, according to modern scholars. These included advanced agricultural societies that had lived along the rivers of the Amazon basin for perhaps as long as 13,000 years.
But the forest stretches deep into time as well as across space. Geological studies suggest it has existed for at least 25 million years, making human history of any kind in the region a very recent affair.
In this time, a wondrous diversity of life has evolved so that despite covering only half a per cent of the earth’s surface, it accounts for ten per cent of all named plants and vertebrate animals. A full accounting of its true biodiversity remains a work in progress. The Amazon has also been described as a “critical component” of the Earth’s climate system, “strongly regulating global carbon and water cycles”, a study published in the journal Science in 2023 concluded.
RM Block
Orellana’s tales of this vast jungle, hinting it contained troves of silver and gold equal to those his fellow conquistadors found in Mexico or Peru, fired a lust for conquest that brought misery and death to the indigenous peoples and a destructive force that, 500 years later, shows no signs of abating.
Enslavement and disease wiped out whole populations; the rubber trade of the late 1800s immiserated those who remained. By the 1970s, the paranoid military dictatorship in Brazil encouraged a wave of settlers to colonise the jungle to bring “people without land” to a “land without people”, as they saw it.
The aforementioned Science paper concluded human impacts are outpacing natural processes and “the Amazon is now perched to transition rapidly from a largely forested to a nonforested landscape, and the changes are happening much too rapidly for Amazonian species, peoples, and ecosystems to respond adaptively”.
Even since this sentence was written, events have accelerated. During the presidency of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil from 2019 to 2023, tacit approval was given to land grabbers and ranchers to clear land, driving a spike in rates of deforestation. The leftist Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (Lula, as he is better known) succeeded him with a promise to reverse this trend. His efforts have met some success and data published in May showed deforestation rates across the country had dropped by one-third in 2024 compared to a year previously.
Good news. However, this fall in land clearance is being swamped by losses of forest due to fires. The year 2024 was the hottest on record, while the drought that afflicted the Amazon basin was the worst in seven decades. According to new data from the World Resources Institute (WRI), 2024 marked a “record-shattering” level of primary forest loss globally, with more than half of that in Brazil and its neighbour, Bolivia.
During a webinar in May, Rod Taylor, global director of the Forests Programme at the WRI warned we are entering “a new phase ... a climate/fire feedback loop” that is entirely down to deliberate land clearance for agriculture, since fires are not a natural phenomenon in the rainforest. In Bolivia, far from this being beyond the reach of authorities, it is the result of deliberate policies designed to increase agricultural exports from its Amazon region.
The 3.1 gigatonnes of greenhouse gas emissions released by the fires globally were greater than the entire emissions from India for one year. Marina Silva, Lula’s respected environment minister, told Time magazine in May that “even if we can nullify deforestation, with climate change, if we don’t reduce carbon from fossil fuel emissions, the forest will be destroyed anyway”.
Lula has staked his reputation as a climate leader by going out of his way to host the Cop30 climate summit, to be held in the Amazonian city of Belem this November.
Fernanda Wenzel is an investigative journalist based in Brazil for Mongabay, a news outlet dedicated to nature conservation. She agrees that Lula’s policies have resulted in “some good news ... but there are contradictions as well”.
She hails Marina Silva as “very competent ... she knows what has to be done. We have environmental agents back on the ground and there have been several raids on indigenous lands to expel invaders – land grabbers, illegal loggers and miners – and we have an increase in remote monitoring using satellite imagery. We have clear signs that things have changed.”
However, even with these successes, “seven trees are knocked down every second ... deforestation is still advancing, we are far from zero deforestation”, something that many tropical countries, including Brazil, have committed to achieving by 2030.
Wenzel points to Lula’s close relationships with big business, including the powerful livestock industry, mining and fossil fuel interests, including in the Amazon basin. She is sceptical that deforestation can be brought to a halt, partly because Lula is not in a politically strong position. “We have a very conservative congress that has never been so strong and is backing agribusiness interests. They are making it difficult to demarcate new indigenous lands, and we know that those territories [are managed by] those who most protect the forest.”
She also notes how the effects of climate change are being felt: “I think it’s going to be really hard to reach zero deforestation by 2030.”
All of the commodities coming from the Amazon, particularly soy and beef, are not being produced to satisfy demand in Brazil. Rather, they are heading north, to countries like Ireland, and concerns have been raised that new trade deals, such as the one between the EU and the Mercosur regional trade block, will make matters worse. “Everything that boosts Brazilian agribusiness production has an impact in the Amazon,” says Wenzel.
This point is echoed by Natalie Unterstell, president of the Talona Institute, a think tank dedicated to Brazilian climate policy. She says the “EU-Mercosur deal could either support or undermine forest protection. Without strong safeguards and accountability, increased trade risks accelerating deforestation, as scientific research has repeatedly shown.”
As part of the Green Deal, the EU agreed to a deforestation regulation that would ban products, such as beef and soy, from any land deforested from December 2020.
However, this has met resistance from countries in the EU as well as Brazil itself, and its implementation has been delayed for one year. “The real challenge is to align trade with both the EU and China, to zero-deforestation goals,” adds Unterstell.
And what of Cop30 in Belem? According to Unterstell, Lula’s “climate leadership will only be confirmed if he sustains the Amazon turnaround [in deforestation] and commits to curb ongoing fossil fuel expansion across Brazil”. He plans to launch the Tropical Forests Forever Facility at the Belem gathering to finance forest preservation and restoration. Greenpeace has described the need for this initiative as “urgent and clear”.
Yet, the willingness to act with the ambition required has not been apparent. “Right now, countries like the US and Brazil are still doubling down on investments in oil, coal, and gas as if time were on our side. It’s not,” says Unterstell.
In 1658, with the European invasion of the Amazon well under way, a Jesuit priest from Co Waterford, Richard Carew, witnessed the forced displacement of thousands of people, among them women, children and the sick, from the jungle to work the plantations around Belem, the city of Cop30. Two thousand people had just arrived in the city, many to face enslavement and hard labour, but the plantation owners wanted more. Carew wrote at the time: “Even though the rivers of these lands are the biggest in the world, the greed of the colonists is greater than all the water.”
There is scarcely any sign that it has yet to abate.
