The destruction and degradation of the world’s largest rainforest has happened in fits and starts. Spanning eight countries, the Amazon rainforest is home to an enormous concentration of life and culture. About half of it is located in Brazil, which is also the heart of the destruction.
The forest’s fortunes have risen and fallen with political leadership. About 17% of the Amazon has already gone, replaced by vast cattle ranches, mines and soy fields. If that figure reaches 20% to 25%, scientists believe the rainforest will lose the ability to sustain itself, with disastrous consequences.
“We stand exactly in a moment of destiny: the tipping point is here, it is now. The peoples and leaders of the Amazon countries together have the power, the science, and the tools to avoid a continental-scale, indeed, a global environmental disaster,” wrote the Brazilian scientists Carlos Nobre and Thomas Lovejoy, the godfather of biodiversity, in 2019.
Between 2004 and 2012, Brazil’s president, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, and the first Rousseff administration achieved huge drops in deforestation – it fell by 84% in that period. This was an internationally rare achievement; Indonesia is the only other large tropical country to have achieved a significant drop in deforestation over a prolonged period.
Since then, the progress has been reversed, especially under the leadership of the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, when a ferocious war on nature took place, including attacks on the territories of the Indigenous peoples who live in the Amazon.
Illegal land mining and farming grew as the funding for environmental agencies was cut and and protections removed, with an area larger than the size of Belgium being cleared.
Lula has vowed to end deforestation in the Amazon but it will not be easy. In February, two months into his administration, deforestation reached the highest levels ever recorded, although a 68% drop was achieved in April.
As the Brazilian Amazon has been cleared, its composition has changed. From 1985 to 2021, satellite imagery shows that farming and mining have replaced virgin forest, with cattle ranching and soy in particular taking up large areas.
While mining has significant impacts on water quality, and causes other forms of pollution, it takes up tiny areas compared with agriculture, which has been the major driver of forest loss.
The view from space
The impact on the Amazon is so vast it can be seen from space. In 2020, Dom Phillips reported from Novo Progresso, a settlers’ town in Pará state, at the beginning of the fire season. Google Earth imagery between 1980 and 2023 shows how the area has been transformed.
“Fires – three times more common in Amazon cattle farming areas – are used to clear forest for pasture. Fragile law enforcement means fines are ignored. And when the loopholes that allow farmers to sell cattle raised on illegally burned or deforested land are taken into account, the future for Novo Progresso’s forests is not bright. Instead, it is black with smoke,” Phillips wrote after speaking with local people, some off the record for fear of repercussions from Bolsonaro’s government.
There are hundreds of places like Novo Progresso that have been transformed in the Brazilian Amazon, being industrialised as the forest disappears.
Additional research by Paul Scruton and Niels de Hoog
Quick GuideWhat is the Bruno and Dom project?
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What is the Bruno and Dom project?
Bruno Pereira, a Brazilian Indigenous expert and Dom Phillips, a British journalist and longtime Guardian contributor, were killed on the Amazon’s Itaquaí River last June while returning from a reporting trip to the remote Javari Valley region.
The attack prompted international outcry, and cast a spotlight on the growing threat to the Amazon posed by extractive industries, both legal and illegal, such as logging, poaching, mining and cattle ranching.
A year after their deaths, the Guardian has joined 15 other international news organisations in a collaborative investigation into organised crime and resource extraction in the Brazilian Amazon. The initiative has been coordinated by Forbidden Stories, the Paris-based non-profit whose mission is to continue the work of reporters who are threatened, censored or killed.
The goal of the project is to honour and pursue the work of Bruno and Dom, to foreground the importance of the Amazon and its people, and to suggest possible ways to save the Amazon.
Who was Bruno Pereira?
Pereira, 41, was a former employee of the Indigenous agency Funai where he led efforts to protect the isolated and uncontacted tribes who live in the Brazilian Amazon. After being sidelined from his post soon after the far-right president Jair Bolsonaro came to power, Pereira went to work with the Javari Valley Indigenous association Univaja, helping create Indigenous patrol teams to stop illegal poachers, miners and loggers invading their protected lands.
Who was Dom Phillips?
Phillips, 57, was a longtime contributor to the Guardian who had
lived in Brazil for 15 years. A former editor of the dance magazine Mixmag, he developed a deep interest in environmental issues, covering the link between logging, mining, the beef industry and the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. His reporting brought him into contact with Pereira, and in 2018 the pair took part in a 17-day expedition deep into the Javari Valley. In 2021 he took a year off to start writing a book, titled How to Save the Amazon. His return to the Javari was to have been the last reporting trip for the project.
What is the Javari Valley?
Sitting on Brazil’s border with Peru and Colombia, the Javari Valley
Indigenous Reservation is a Portugal-sized swathe of rainforest and
rivers which is home to about 6,000 Indigenous people from the Kanamari, Kulina, Korubo, Marubo, Matis, Mayoruna and Tsohom-dyapa groups, as well as 16 isolated groups.
It is also a hotspot for poachers, fishers and illegal loggers,
prompting violent conflicts between the Indigenous inhabitants and the
riverside communities which fiercely opposed the reservation’s
creation in 2001. Its strategic location makes it a key route for smuggling cocaine between Peru, Colombia and Brazil.
What happened to Pereira and Philips?
On 2 June 2022, Pereira and Phillips travelled up the Itaquaí River from the town of Atalaia do Norte to report on efforts to stop illegal fishing. Two days later, members of the Indigenous patrol team with whom Pereira and Phillips were travelling were threatened by an illegal fisher. Early on 5 June, the pair set out on the return leg before dawn, hoping to safely pass a river community that was home to several known poachers.
They never arrived, and after a search by teams of local Indigenous activists, their remains were discovered on 15 June.
Three fishers are being held in high-security prisons awaiting trial for the killings: brothers Amarildo and Oseney da Costa de Oliveira and a third man, Jefferson da Silva Lima.
Federal police have alleged that a fourth man, nicknamed Colombia, was the mastermind of the killings.