Amazon Rainforest

The Amazon Rainforest is not a heritage site in the conventional sense, and including it alongside Pompeii and Stonehenge requires a moment of explanation. It has no walls, no inscriptions, no founding emperor. What it has is approximately 10 percent of all species on earth packed into 5.5 million square kilometres of living forest, the largest river system in the world by discharge volume, an Indigenous cultural history stretching back at least 13,000 years, and a role in regulating the global climate that makes it, in the most literal sense, infrastructure for human civilisation on a planetary scale.

The scale defeats ordinary description. The Amazon River and its tributaries drain an area the size of the contiguous United States, moving approximately 20 percent of all the fresh water that flows into the world's oceans. The forest it waters contains an estimated 390 billion individual trees of approximately 16,000 species, roughly 2.5 million species of insects, 1,300 species of birds, 3,000 species of fish, and a total biodiversity that science has not yet fully inventoried. New species are described from the Amazon at a rate of several hundred per year.

The forest is also a carbon store of global significance, holding an estimated 150 to 200 billion tonnes of carbon in its biomass and soils. When it burns or is cleared, that carbon enters the atmosphere. When it is intact, it absorbs carbon dioxide and produces the moisture recycling that generates the rainfall on which the agricultural economies of southern South America depend.

Within and across the forest, approximately 400 Indigenous nations live, speaking around 300 languages, representing cultural and linguistic diversity of a kind that exists nowhere else on earth. They are also, in most of the countries where they live, the most effective guardians of the forest itself: deforestation rates are consistently lower in Indigenous territories than in adjacent areas under any other management regime.

The Amazon was not the empty wilderness that European colonisers imagined and that their descendants continued to assume well into the twentieth century. Archaeological evidence accumulated over the past three decades has demonstrated that the Amazon was home to large, sophisticated, and spatially extensive pre-Columbian societies that substantially modified the landscape and managed it with considerable intentionality. The terra preta soils found across wide areas of the Amazon basin — dark, carbon-rich, extraordinarily fertile soils that are clearly anthropogenic in origin — are the most visible evidence of these societies, supplemented by the discovery of extensive earthwork systems, road networks, settlement mounds, and geoglyphs that are only now being fully mapped.

The diseases brought by European contact in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries killed an estimated 90 percent of the Amazon's Indigenous population within a century of first contact, a demographic catastrophe so severe that it may have caused a measurable reduction in atmospheric carbon dioxide as the farmland and managed landscapes of the depopulated societies reverted to forest. What European explorers encountered as primeval wilderness was in many cases a landscape of recovery from one of the most devastating pandemics in human history.

The Amazon's significance for the future is if anything greater than its significance as a record of the past. Destroying it before that knowledge is developed is the heritage equivalent of burning a library whose contents have not been catalogued.

Deforestation and Agricultural Expansion

The primary and dominant threat to the Amazon is the deliberate clearance of forest for cattle ranching, soy production, and other agricultural uses, driven by Brazilian and global demand for beef and agricultural commodities. The economic incentives driving deforestation are substantial, and the enforcement of environmental legislation in a basin the size of the contiguous United States is logistically and politically difficult. Illegal deforestation accounts for a significant proportion of total forest loss and has been tacitly tolerated during periods of weak environmental enforcement.

Illegal Mining

Illegal gold mining, known as garimpo, has expanded dramatically in recent years, particularly in Indigenous territories where it is explicitly prohibited. The environmental damage goes beyond the direct clearing of forest: mercury used in gold processing contaminates river systems across wide areas, affecting both aquatic ecosystems and the health of Indigenous and riverine communities who depend on fish as a primary protein source.

Climate Change and Drought

The Amazon is entering a period of increasing climatic stress independently of deforestation. The severe droughts of 2005, 2010, 2015, and 2023 have each caused tree mortality and wildfire across large areas. The interaction between drought stress and the reduced moisture recycling caused by deforestation creates a compounding effect: less forest means less rainfall, which stresses the remaining forest, which reduces its resilience to further deforestation and drought.

Infrastructure Development

Road construction, dam building, and mining infrastructure open previously inaccessible forest areas to deforestation and illegal activity. Their effects extend far beyond their direct footprint through the access they provide to settlers, loggers, and miners.

Indigenous Rights and Territorial Security

The most effective conservation tool in the Amazon is secure Indigenous land tenure. Deforestation rates in legally recognised and effectively defended Indigenous territories are substantially lower than in adjacent areas under any other management regime — a finding robust enough to be considered settled evidence in conservation science. Strengthening Indigenous land rights is not just a matter of social justice but of conservation effectiveness.

The research literature on the Amazon spans ecology, anthropology, archaeology, climate science, conservation biology, and political economy, and it has been transformed in the past two decades by the combination of new remote sensing capabilities and new archaeological methods.

The discovery and documentation of Amazonian Dark Earths, the terra preta soils, and their association with pre-Columbian societies of considerable scale and sophistication has required a fundamental revision of the standard narrative of Amazon prehistory. Research by Anna Roosevelt, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, Michael Heckenberger, and many others has established that the Amazon was not the wilderness that European colonisers encountered but a managed landscape supporting large populations whose societies were complex, diverse, and in many cases environmentally sustainable in ways that industrial agriculture is not.

Climate science research has produced the tipping point framework that now defines the most urgent conservation argument for the Amazon. Research by Carlos Nobre, Thomas Lovejoy, and colleagues has combined deforestation data with climate modelling to estimate the threshold beyond which self-reinforcing drying and forest loss becomes the dominant dynamic.

The tipping point scenario is not a hypothesis. It is a scientifically grounded projection of what happens when deforestation and climate stress together push the Amazon's moisture recycling system below the threshold needed to sustain the forest. At or beyond that point, dieback becomes self-reinforcing, the forest transitions toward savannah across large areas of the eastern and southern Amazon, and the carbon stored in the dying trees enters the atmosphere in quantities that make the global climate targets agreed in Paris effectively unachievable.

The consequences extend far beyond Brazil. The agricultural regions of southern Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina depend on the moisture generated by the Amazon. The global carbon budget depends on the Amazon remaining a carbon sink rather than becoming a carbon source. The pharmaceutical, agricultural, and ecological services the forest provides to human civilisation globally have no substitute.

The Amazon does not need to be discovered or appreciated. Its value is understood by scientists, by the people who live in it, and by anyone who has engaged with the evidence. What it needs is the political will — at the national level in the countries where it exists and at the international level in the trade and climate agreements that shape the economic incentives driving its destruction — to treat its survival as a non-negotiable condition of a liveable planet. If it matters to you, that is where the argument needs to be made and where the pressure needs to be applied.