The Amazon rainforest

 

The Amazon rainforest, also called Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a moist broadleaf tropical rainforest in the Amazon biome that covers most of the Amazon basin of South America. 

This basin encompasses 7,000,000 km2 (2,700,000 sq mi), of which 5,500,000 km2 (2,100,000 sq mi) are covered by the rainforest. 

This region includes territory belonging to nine nations and 3,344 formally acknowledged indigenous territories. 

Amazon Rainforest, large tropical rainforest occupying the drainage basin of the Amazon River and its tributaries in northern South America and covering an area of 2,300,000 square miles (6,000,000 square km). Comprising about 40 percent of Brazil’s total area, it is bounded by the Guiana Highlands to the north, the Andes Mountains to the west, the Brazilian central plateau to the south, and the Atlantic Ocean to the east.

Amazonia is the largest river basin in the world, and its forest stretches from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the tree line of the Andes in the west. 

The forest widens from a 200-mile (320-km) front along the Atlantic to a belt 1,200 miles (1,900 km) wide where the lowlands meet the Andean foothills. 

The immense extent and great continuity of this rainforest is a reflection of the high rainfall, high humidity, and monotonously high temperatures that prevail in the region. 

The Amazon Rainforest is the world’s richest and most-varied biological reservoir, containing several million species of insects, plants, birds, and other forms of life, many still unrecorded by science. 

The luxuriant vegetation encompasses a wide variety of trees, including many species of myrtle, laurel, palm, and acacia, as well as rosewood, Brazil nut, and rubber tree. 

Excellent timber is furnished by the mahogany and the Amazonian cedar.  Major wildlife includes jaguar, manatee, tapir, red deer, capybara and many other types of rodents, and several types of monkeys. In the 20th century, Brazil’s rapidly growing population settled major areas of the Amazon Rainforest. 

The size of the Amazon forest shrank dramatically as a result of settlers’ clearance of the land to obtain lumber and to create grazing pastures and farmland. 

Brazil holds approximately 60 percent of the Amazon basin within its borders, and some 1,583,000 square miles (4,100,000 square km) of this was covered by forests in 1970. 

The amount of forest cover declined to some 1,283,000 square miles (3,323,000 square km) by 2016, about 81 percent of the area that had been covered by forests in 1970. In the 1990s the Brazilian government and various international bodies began efforts to protect parts of the forest from human encroachment, exploitation, deforestation, and other forms of destruction. 

Although Brazil’s Amazon continues to lose forest cover, the pace of this loss declined from roughly 0.4 percent per year during the 1980s and ’90s to roughly 0.1–0.2 percent per year between 2008 and 2016. However, some 75,000 fires occurred in the Brazilian Amazon during the first half of 2019 (an increase of 85 percent over 2018), largely due to encouragement from Brazilian Pres. Jair Bolsonaro, a strong proponent of tree clearing. 

More than 30 million people of 350 different ethnic groups live in the Amazon, which are subdivided into 9 different national political systems and 3,344 formally acknowledged indigenous territories. Indigenous peoples make up 9% of the total population, and 60 of the groups remain largely isolated. Large scale deforestation is occurring in the forest, creating different harmful effects. 

Economic losses due to deforestation in Brazil could be approximately 7 times higher in comparison to the cost of all commodities produced through deforestation. In 2023, the World Bank published a report proposing a non-deforestation based economic program in the region.