Beyond deforestation: 38% of the Amazon Rainforest is affected by other forms of degradation

More than one third of the Amazon Rainforest is already affected by drought, fires, logging and the” edge effects”, according to a study published in the scientific journal Science.

Authored by 35 Brazilian and foreign researchers, the study differentiates between deforestation and degradation. While, in the former, the forest undergoes major changes to make way for a new use – for example, an area that is burned to turn into pasture – degradation is differentiated by involving more changes in forest cover and by not having the objective of transforming the use of that land.

Degradation includes fires; drought (intensified by climate change); selective logging (legal or illegal; “selective” because some commercially interesting trees are removed, leaving others standing); and edge effects (changes in forests near deforested areas, thus a direct consequence of deforestation).

The study estimates that 38% of the Amazon Rainforest is now affected by some type of degradation. “The degraded area in the Amazon and the carbon emissions from degradation are equal or even greater than those from deforestation,” said study leader David Lapola, a researcher at the Center for Meteorological and Climatic Research Applied to Agriculture at Unicamp (State University of Campinas) and a doctorate from the University of Kassel, Germany, to BBC News Brazil.