Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has lost an area equivalent to the size of Spain in the past four decades and is now approaching a dangerous tipping point, new monitoring data revealed on Monday, September 15.
The findings, released by the MapBiomas monitoring platform, showed that the Amazon is nearing a “point of no return” after losing 20 to 25 percent of its vegetation. Researchers warned that once this threshold is crossed, the rainforest will no longer be able to sustain itself.
“When too much vegetation is lost, the rain cycle is disrupted, and large areas tend to transform into drier savannas,” said Bruno Ferreira, a researcher at MapBiomas.
Brazil, which is home to 60 percent of the Amazon rainforest that stretches across nine countries, is preparing to host the UN COP30 climate conference in Belem, a city in the Amazon region, in November.
Satellite images studied by MapBiomas revealed that 49.1 million hectares (121 million acres) of rainforest have been destroyed between 1985 and 2024. When other forms of plant life are factored in, the Amazon has lost 13 percent of its native vegetation during that period.
The data also showed that livestock farming has increased almost fivefold over the same four decades, underscoring the pressure from agricultural expansion.
Deforestation rates had slowed since President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva returned to office in 2023, reversing years of loosened protections under his predecessor. However, a historic drought in the Amazon fueled widespread forest fires, resulting in a four-percent rise in deforestation between August 2024 and July 2025.
The combination of human activity and climate-linked disasters has intensified fears that the Amazon, often described as the “lungs of the Earth,” could soon reach an irreversible stage of environmental collapse.
