Saving the Brazilian Amazon and Beyond
Conservation’s Greatest Challenge and Opportunity: The Amazon
The Amazon is the world’s largest and most important tropical rainforest, originally spanning 1.7 billion acres—nearly the size of the continental U.S. It is a refuge for a third of Earth’s terrestrial species and stores more than 123 billion metric tons of CO 2 equivalents, more than four times the combined annual emissions of the top 10 CO 2 emitting nations. The Amazon is also the ancestral territory and current home to many of the world’s Indigenous Peoples.
In the map below, the dense, dark green area indicates the diminishing Amazon rainforest.
The Brazilian Amazon, with deforestation in red, protected areas in shades of green, and the huge expanse of government-owned, intact, but unprotected forest in orange. Protecting the orange is the number one objective of our strategy.
The stakes are huge. Within the Brazilian Amazon, 141 million acres of land are government-controlled but not yet designated for a particular purpose. Each and every one of these acres could be preserved forever as part of a protected area such as an Indigenous reserve or national park. Or it could be chain-sawed and burned to the ground for beef or soy... each and every one of these acres of forest is the irreplaceable home of myriad, exquisite creatures found nowhere else on Earth.
