“Deforestation in the Amazon is slowing down. Around 5,800 square kilometers of the forest were cleared this year, down from 6,500 in 2024 and over 20,000 in 1988,” reports The Doomslayer.
Sustainability By Numbers explains:
This year, 5,800 square kilometres (km2) were cleared, which was an 11% drop compared to last year. You can see this in the chart below, which shows deforestation rates since the late 1980s.
This data comes from PRODES (Program for the Calculation of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon), which carries out satellite monitoring of the region to detect deforestation. It also incorporates data from DETER, which is a rapid alert system that tries to detect changes in forests as they happen.
Trees in the Amazon are getting bigger and more robust, due to higher levels of carbon dioxide.
Most of the world’s forests are expanding. Reforestation is offsetting the effects of global warming in parts of the U.S.
The amount of vegetation on the Earth has increased for each of the last 30 years.
The replacement of horses with automobiles restored New England’s forests, which had mostly disappeared by 1910, but now cover much of the region. Today, Vermont is 78% forested, but in 1910, it was mostly un-forested.
England has slightly more forest now than it did during the Black Death around 1350, even though England today has a dozen times as many people as it did back then. Scotland has many times more forest than it did in 1350. The United Kingdom as a whole has three times as much forest as it did at the start of the 20th century.
China’s forests have grown by about 234,000 square miles over the last 30 years, an area the size of Ukraine. The European Union has added an area the size of Cambodia to its woodlands.
Robots with artificial intelligence will reduce the need for weed-killer and pesticides by more precisely targeting weeds and pests. More effective weeding could also increase agricultural yields per acre. Increased crop yields reduce the amount of land needed to grow crops, and increase the amount of land that is reforested. More precise targeting of weeds could cut farmers’ costs, and radically reduce the size of the crop chemical industry, because robots will use up to 90% less spray to kill the same number of weeds and pests. Some robots using artificial intelligence can identify and kill 100,000 weeds per hour.
