The Amazon has suffered its most destructive fire season in more than two decades, releasing a staggering 791 million tons of carbon dioxide—on par with Germany’s annual emissions. Scientists found that for the first time, fire-driven degradation, not deforestation, was the main source of carbon emissions, signaling a dangerous shift in the rainforest’s decline.
A new study by researchers at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre reveals that the Amazon rainforest has just undergone its most devastating forest fire season in over two decades, which triggered record-breaking carbon emissions and exposed the region’s growing ecological fragility despite a slowing trend in deforestation. The 2024 fires released an estimated 791 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, which roughly equates to the annual emissions of Germany. This marks a sevenfold increase from the average of the previous two years.
According to the study published in Biogeosciences, 3.3 million hectares of Amazon forest were impacted by fires last year alone. This extraordinary surge in fire activity is likely driven by a combination of extreme drought stress exacerbated by climate change, forest fragmentation, and land-use mismanagement (e.g., escape fires or criminal fires by land grabbers), leading to significant forest degradation. For the first time in the analysis covering 2022-2024, fire-induced degradation has overtaken deforestation as the primary driver of carbon emissions in the Amazon.
The geographical spread of the fires was equally alarming. In Brazil, 2024 marked the highest level of emissions from forest degradation on record. In Bolivia, fires affected over 9% of the country’s remaining intact forest cover, which is a dramatic blow to a region that has historically served as a vital biodiversity reservoir and carbon sink.
While past reports have highlighted the dangers of deforestation, this study spotlights a more insidious threat: fire-driven degradation that erodes forest integrity without necessarily clearing it. Degraded forests may look intact from above, but they lose a significant portion of their biomass and ecological function. Unlike clear-cut areas, these degraded forests often fall through the cracks of national accounting systems and international policy frameworks.
The study calls for immediate and coordinated action to reduce fire use, strengthen forest protection policies, and support local and Indigenous stewardship efforts. It also highlights the need for enhanced international climate finance mechanisms that recognize and address forest degradation, not just deforestation.
The European “discovery” of the Americas has been unmitigated disaster on our climate and environment. No amount of scathing colonial squawking of so called: indigenous primitiveness, can hold against the hurricane of climatic tragedy that will befall all of our people due to their barbarous extraction and destruction of ecosystems that older than all of humanity. It’s so important that we destroy utterly this system and its colonial threads.
Thank you for the article.