Key messages
- The Amazon is under increasing pressure from multiple threats, leading to ecosystem degradation. Some areas are already shifting from carbon sinks to carbon sources, and there is growing concern about further disruption of water recycling at a regional scale. Both of these processes can have far-reaching consequences for regional and global climate.
- Due to climate change, Amazon forests are approaching multiple thresholds (related to temperature, rainfall, and seasonality), beyond which significant ecological changes can be triggered, potentially leading to a large-scale forest collapse. Deforestation and forest degradation through local activities (e.g., logging, agricultural expansion) lead to habitat fragmentation, further eroding resilience to climate change.
- Extensive mitigation is critically needed for reducing the impacts of climate change that erode the forests’ resilience, such as extreme droughts and fires. But local and regional actions that preserve and increase the forests’ ecological and cultural diversity can play a crucial role to strengthen its resilience to climate change.
The Amazon is a heterogeneous and complex system, shaped over tens of millions of years and composed of various types of interconnected aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. It hosts ~10% of the Earth’s terrestrial biodiversity and more than 400 ethnicities of Indigenous peoples and local communities. By regulating temperature and precipitation and sequestering carbon, it dampens human-induced climate change, and by recycling around 16–22% of Earth’s freshwater, it substantially affects the planetary energy balance.
But human impacts are reshaping the Amazon. Legal and illegal logging; agricultural expansions; intentional burning; the development of disrupting infrastructure such as dams and roads; the non-sustainable extraction of goods; an increasing urban population; and climate change-induced rising temperatures and changing rainfall patterns are all increasingly eroding the resilience of biophysical and social systems.
Critical warning signs are emerging; some parts of the forest have switched from carbon sink to carbon source, effectively reinforcing climate change. Events such as the 2020–2022 flooding and the subsequent 2023–2024 drought have substantially harmed socio-ecological systems throughout the Amazon basin. Impacts were observed on people (e.g., displacement, transportation shortages) and ecosystems (e.g., reduced productivity). The repercussions extend far beyond the region, threatening water, energy, and food security locally and globally, and jeopardising the stability of the forest itself. Growing concern centres on the possibility of a systematic collapse triggered by self-reinforcing feedback loops and the crossing of critical climate thresholds. While local or regional tipping points are expected to occur first, the large-scale tipping of the Amazon rainforest may soon follow.
Increasing the resilience of the Amazon basin is crucial to reduce the risk for future ecological and societal disasters. The diversity of the Amazon basin is strongly linked to the resilience of the ecosystem (Figure 6), especially in the face of disturbances mentioned above. These threats, unevenly distributed across space and time, are pushing the system toward various thresholds – on temperature, rainfall, seasonality, dry season length, and deforestation – at different rates. Temperature thresholds can significantly impact photosynthesis efficiency, bringing the forest closer to its physiological limits. A richer diversity of biological functions or ecological roles within the ecosystem (i.e., functional diversity) enhances the Amazon’s resilience to climate change, underscoring the importance of plans to conserve and restore biodiversity to strengthen forest resilience.
To halt the environmental and economic practices driving the destruction of the Amazon, concerted local and regional changes are crucial. Restoration at regional scale can restore significant amounts of carbon stocks, disrupting the self-reinforcing feedback loop between climate change and forest degradation.. Co-developing reforestation plans locally should also aim to strengthen rural economies and improve livelihoods in the long term, empowering local communities and Indigenous people. Developing an economy that values the environment is essential. Biocultural diversity, especially regarding land management practices, is important to ensure the continued provision of ecosystem services, as well as to generate opportunities to improve the living conditions of rural, forest, and urban populations who currently face poverty and inequality. The foundation for this sustainable use is broad and diverse, encompassing traditional activities of forest communities, biodiversity-rich family farming, and all stakeholders within rural landscapes.
Protecting the Amazon rainforest is critical for stabilising the climate. But climate change is already shaping the forest with conditions that exacerbate fire and droughts. Local and regional actions to increase the Amazon’s resilience by protecting cultural and ecological diversity are crucial, but ultimately the future of the Amazon depends on globally concerted efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.
Social-ecological “hope spots”
Social-ecological “hope spots” are emerging across Amazonian Indigenous and local communities, despite the challenges. These are areas where Indigenous and local communities collaborate with science and technology initiatives to produce new models of biodiversity and cultural heritage conservation, demonstrating successful cases of biocultural conservation. Community-based conservation initiatives for sustainable-use protected areas – where local communities are empowered to protect their own territories against illegal fishers, loggers and poachers and have a large degree of autonomous decision-making – have proven effective to both maintaining biocultural diversity and conservation while also enhancing livelihoods in rural Amazonia. By acting as buffers against large-scale deforestation and degradation, Indigenous territories and protected areas play a critical role in preserving the Amazon’s resilience and biodiversity.
Policy implications
- At COP28, Brazil stressed the importance of the Amazon, and re-stated the commitment to ending deforestation by 2030, originally put forward at the Glasgow Leaders’ Declaration on Forests and Land Use (COP26), with over 100 countries joining the Global Forest Finance Pledge (US$12 billion in five years). Significantly, Brazil has proposed the development of a Tropical Forest Forever Fund (TFFF), aiming to mobilise US$250 billion annually for tropical forest conservation. With its focus on climate finance, COP29 in Baku should see progress towards the TFFF, for which Brazil aims to have a fully operational facility by COP30 in Belém.
- Countries with Amazonian territories must strengthen law enforcement capabilities and penalties, to control the main drivers of deforestation – in particular, combating illegal logging and mining which threaten Indigenous and local communities, as well as further agricultural expansion. For local communities reliant on unsustainable activities, governments should promote and support the voluntary adoption of alternative livelihoods strategies.
- Ensuring the continuity and funding of programmes for the monitoring of forest cover and use, including earth observation and commodity traceability tools, is essential for policy development, law enforcement and advancing basic research.
- Supporting Indigenous and locally led initiatives for sustainable economic development in synergy with protection and restoration of biodiversity should be prioritised. There is political momentum stemming from the Belém Declaration, signed at the Amazon Summit (2023) by the eight countries that share the Amazon, in which they commit to regional cooperation to halt deforestation and promote sustainable forest management, emphasising Indigenous knowledge and guaranteeing their territorial rights.
Deforestation and forest degradation in the Amazon reduce biodiversity and amplify climate change by depleting carbon stocks, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop. Enhancing the Amazon’s biological and cultural diversity strengthens its resilience towards climate change, helping to break this cycle.
