The Amazon is approaching an irreversible tipping point

THE AMAZON basin, most of which sits within the borders of Brazil, contains 40% of the world’s tropical forests and accounts for 10-15% of the biodiversity of Earth’s continents. Since the 1970s nearly 800,000km² of Brazil’s original 4m km² (1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has been lost to logging, farming, mining, roads, dams and other forms of development—an area equivalent to that of Turkey, and bigger than that of Texas. Over the same period, the average temperature in the basin has risen by about 0.6°C. This century, the region has suffered a series of severe droughts.

Both the reduction in tree coverage and the change in climate were endangering the forest’s future well before Brazil’s general elections of October 2018. But after that the forest faced another threat: Jair Bolsonaro, the new president, and arguably the most environmentally dangerous head of state in the world.