The Amazon matters to the planet’s climate regulation and rainfall cycle out of all proportion to its area. A report from Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP) puts a number on how much of it is gone.
240 million acres of primary forest — an area equal to the US states of Texas and California combined — has been destroyed.
That is roughly 15 per cent of all primary forest across the nine countries of the Amazon basin, lost permanently. The 2021 report put the figure at 13.2 per cent. On paper the gap looks small; on the ground it is an environmental collapse across an enormous area.
Where it happened
79.4 per cent of the destruction occurred in Brazil. Bolivia accounts for 6.2 per cent, Peru 5.8 per cent and Colombia 4.5 per cent.
Between 2022 and 2025, a further 32.2 million acres went — close to fifteen times the area of Yellowstone National Park. The strong El Niño of 2023 drove a record amount of forest to burn in 2024.
The two causes named are intense land grabbing and the destruction of wildfire.
The mechanism worth understanding
This is the part that makes the Amazon different from an ordinary forest loss story.
The Amazon’s enormous trees draw water from the soil and release it into the atmosphere as vapour. Wind spreads that vapour across the continent — scientists call these flying rivers. Through this process the Amazon generates roughly half of its own rainfall, and the same water is used several times over as it moves.
So the forest is not merely a beneficiary of the regional climate. It is a substantial part of the machinery producing it. Remove enough of the trees and you do not just lose trees — you reduce the rain that the remaining trees depend on.
Scientists have put the threshold at 25 per cent: if a quarter of the Amazon’s forest is destroyed, the entire basin changes permanently.
The correction the researchers want made
Researcher Matt Finer makes a pointed observation about how this is usually reported. News coverage, he says, often describes the Amazon as approaching a dangerous tipping point.
The actual fact is that clearance and fire have already destroyed 15 per cent of it. Through that, the hydrological cycle that sustains the rainforest may be disrupted permanently.
The distinction matters more than it sounds. A looming tipping point is a reason to debate. Fifteen per cent already gone, with the water cycle already affected, is a description of the present — and it removes the comfort of treating this as a future problem that someone will address before it arrives.
Finer notes the effect will land fastest where the region is already damaged. For farmers and ordinary people in Peru and Bolivia who depend on the rain, the question is no longer abstract. The uncertainty of whether rain-bearing cloud will arrive is a bigger reality for them than any distant environmental crisis.
Why read this from Bangladesh
Two reasons, and neither is sentiment about a distant forest.
The first is the mechanism. A system that generates the conditions it needs to survive, and that degrades once enough of it is removed, is not unique to the Amazon. The Sundarbans performs a comparable structural role here — not rainfall generation, but storm-surge absorption — and the same logic applies: the protection is a function of the extent, and losing extent is not linear in its consequences.
The second is how we got this number. MAAP is a satellite monitoring programme. Nobody walked the Amazon basin. The loss was measured because somebody built a system to measure it continuously, over nine countries, for years — which is the only reason there is a 2021 figure to compare the 2026 one against. Without that baseline, 15 per cent would be an assertion rather than a measurement.
Related: what long-baseline observation finds.
