Amazon Basin

The Amazon River basin, centred around the Amazon River and its tributaries, encompasses the largest rainforest ecosystem on planet Earth, an area in size nearly as large as the continental United States.

The Amazon river has the greatest volume flow of any river on the planet, and is second only to the Nile in length of Earth’s rivers. The Amazon basin is composed of a mix of ecosystems and forest types from savannas to swamps to tropical rainforests, but is dominated by rainforest, with the rainforests of the Amazon basin representing more than half of all the world’s remaining tropical forests.

The Amazon basin encompasses some 40% of the continental landmass of South America, and 60% of the Amazon is encompassed within Brazil, followed by Peru, Columbia, Bolivia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname and Venezuela.

The Amazon basin is bound in the West by the Andes mountains, where its source is less than 160km from the Pacific Ocean. To the north the basin is bound by the Guiana Highlands, to the south by the Brazilian Highlands, and covering half of the continent of South America, the Amazon runs east to the Atlantic Ocean.

The Amazon provides home to more types of plants and animals than any other ecosystem on Earth – estimated to be home to potentially up to 30% of the Earth’s species. The Amazon is home to more than 40,000 types of plants, 3,000 fish species, 1,300 birds, 1,000 amphibians, 430 mammals and 400 types of reptiles.

The Amazon basin is made up of extensive floodplains that border the main river and its tributaries, with over two-thirds of the basin covered in rainforest, believed to have been present for more than 55 million years.

The rich and complex vegetation of the Amazon’s rainforests include an extraordinary variety of species, including the rosewood, Brazil nut, rubber tree along with species of laurel, palm, myrtle and acacia trees. ‘Emergent’ trees can rise up to 60 metres from the canopy floor, whilst there are usually several levels of rainforest understory featuring trees covered in epiphytes, mosses, and lichens, along with ferns and networks of vines.

Dryer forest and savannahs are found in the northern and southern reaches of the Amazon, with the taller rainforest confined to streams and open grassy savannas replacing the higher forests. In the western reaches of the Amazon as it reaches the Andes, the Amazon’s ‘cloud’ forests becomes shorter, more stunted, tangled and mossy.

The Amazon basin is teeming with life, with the rainforest rich with a cacophony of sounds from birds, monkeys and insects.

Larger animals found in the Amazon include the Tapir, a number of deer species, and cats such as the jaguar, along with two sloth species, anteaters, iguanas, armadillos and the giant anaconda snake.

The forest canopy itself hosts an extraordinary array of life, with a number of species of monkeys including the large spider monkey, the howler monkeys with their distinctive calls, and the widespread squirrel monkey, along with sakis, marmosets, titis and others.

The birdlife of the Amazon is brilliant and rich in colour and diversity, with many hundreds of species from parrots and macaws, to woodpeckers, cormorants, parakeets, kingfishers, owls, the Harpy eagle and vultures.

There are thousands of species of insects that have been identified within the Amazon too, including cicadas, mosquitoes, fireflies, giant spiders and hundreds of species of butterflies, many brilliantly coloured.

An estimated fifth of the Earth’s surface water runoff is carried by the Amazon river system, and this huge volume of fresh water discharging into the sea leads to a plume of fresh water continuing more than 60km out into the sea.

More than 2000 different species of fish have been identified within the Amazon’s river system. The ancient giant pirarucu fish, a number of species of catfish and the piranha are some of the more well recognised fish species. The river system is also frequented by species of Caiman (from the Alligator family), river dolphins, the giant otter, the manatee (“sea cow”), and many species that inhabit the river banks, such as the capybara - the world’s largest rodent.

There are many beautiful and extraordinary species of frogs, snakes and lizards also found throughout the basin.

People have a connection with the Amazon for Millenia, with shell mounds dated as far back as 7500BC. Evidence of entire villages at the mouth of the Amazon river have also been found, representing a flourishing civilisation between 800 and 1400 AD, known as the Marajoara. Beyond that, there is extensive evidence of large-scale Indigenous societies having existed throughout the Amazon River basin for thousands of years, with cities, towns and chiefdoms, and an estimated more than 3 million Indigenous people living in and around the Amazon at the time that the Spanish Conquistador De Orellana visited in 1541.

The Indigenous peoples of the Amazon had rich advanced societies, with agriculture, large towns and cities of up to 100,000 people or more, selective use of fire to change the ecology and fertility of land to support agriculture, and complex societal structures to support the population. There tended to be larger and denser permanent population groups along the Amazon River and its major tributaries where large-scale farming and agricultural activities were undertaken and supported by fishing and hunting. In areas further away from the rivers and in more remote reaches of the Amazon lived smaller and more widely dispersed semi-nomadic groups of people, who relied more on collecting nuts, berries, fruits, hunting and carrying out smaller scale agriculture.

Europeans arrived at the Amazon in the 1500s, with the name Amazonas thought to be a Spanish derivation of the female warriors in Greek mythology, after a Spanish expedition was attacked by mostly female warriors.

European exploration in the coming decades was a precursor to colonisation. From the 16^th to the 18^thcenturies and beyond, colonisation had a dramatic and devastating impact on the Amazon’s indigenous people, with colonists undergoing organised raids, bringing slavery, new and devastating diseases such as smallpox and influenza, and persecution. The rivers tended to be the natural routes used for colonisation and so those Indigenous communities living closest to the major rivers were the first to be affected, with a dramatic decline in the Indigenous population of the Amazon, and only those communities living in more remote forests within the Amazon initially able to continue to live unaffected.

Today, most Indigenous peoples within the Amazon live in declared “indigenous lands” with boundaries that enable a lifestyle that incorporates elements of their traditional ways of life and the modern world.

Currently there are approximately 30 million people that live within the Amazon basin. Most of these people live within a number of large cities with populations of between 100,000 and up to 2 million, that have become the major population, industry and service centres for the basin. Outside of these large population centres, the Amazon is relatively sparsely populated. Of those people living within the Amazon basin, there are an estimated 2.7 million indigenous people from over 350 different ethnic groups.

As colonisation and the industrial revolution accelerated and expanded development within the Amazon basin in the 18^th, 19^th and early 20^th centuries, this began to disturb and disrupt the ecology of the basin, with clearing of forests for agriculture and development.

This process, however, has accelerated dramatically over the past 50 years, with the Amazon basin’s large roadless interior being opened up by the Trans-Amazonian highway in 1972, and a slash and burn agricultural method opening up the Amazon to a dramatic expansion of agriculture. The Amazon basin has now been integrated into the global economy as a source of vast quantities of timber, minerals, soy, beef and other exports.

The consequence of this has been a dramatic and permanent loss of forest cover from the Amazon Rainforest. It is estimated that, for example, more than a fifth of the Brazilian Amazon – an area greater in size to that of Spain – has been permanently cleared since the 1970s.

There are a number of drivers of this destruction of the Amazon’s forests, but the clearing of forest for cattle to support the international beef and leather trades is believed to be responsible for around 80% of forest loss in the Amazon basin – equivalent to 14% of the world’s annual forest loss. 91% of forest loss in the Amazon since 1970 is now used for livestock pasture. Other contributors to deforestation within the amazon include clearing for other crops such as soybean, along with timber cutting and plantation development, smaller scale agricultural activities, mining, and urban expansion. The poor soils of the Amazon mean that there is often a process of slash and burn of forest areas for agriculture but the soil being able to sustain crops for only a few rotations before more areas have to be cleared. Logging is the main driver of forest disturbance and degradation, often paving the way for eventual permanent clearing.

Global warming is having an impact on the Amazon too. High temperatures are reducing rainfall across large areas of rainforest, drying them out and increasing the Amazon’s susceptibility to fire and a transition to savanna. Modelling has suggested that if there is a loss of forest cover to below 40% within the Amazon basin, it may lead to a ‘tipping point’ where a self-perpetuating change of the Amazon’s forest ecosystems may occur, leading to conversion to savannas and ‘desertification’ and the resultant discharge of carbon into the atmosphere therefore leading to catastrophic impacts for the earth’s climate. In addition, the impacts of forest loss include further destruction and disruption of the lives of indigenous peoples, the loss of the Amazon’s immense stores of plant and animal life.

The loss of the Amazon’s forests and the need to preserve and restore them presents an immense challenge for all of humanity.

With the drivers of destruction of the Amazon being from factors both local and global, there are many components of work needed to protect the Amazon. Globally, for example, efforts by NGOs such as Greenpeace to highlight and bring consumer awareness to the sourcing of Soy from cleared Amazonian rainforest in global supply chains, culminated in a moratorium on clearing for Soy, whilst a similar focus on cattle production led to a ‘Cattle Agreement’ where producers agreed to only produce from places where environmental laws were being respected.

Similarly, efforts by a conservation minded Brazilian government between 2004 and 2012 including the establishment of the world’s largest network of protected areas, implementation of a deforestation reduction program, and better enforcement and financial incentives to respect environmental laws, leading to a significant drop in forest clearing in Brazil.

However, these efforts went backwards over the last decade, with big cattle producers working around livestock rules, and the Temer and now Bolsonaro governments of Brazil undoing environmental protections, unwinding conservation areas, and actively promoting deforestation and the expansion of mining, logging and agribusiness into the Amazon, with a resultant dramatic acceleration again of deforestation.

To protect the Amazon, priorities needed include a significant expansion of protected areas, the rehabilitation of damaged and degraded areas of forest and habitats, a stronger enforcement of and incentives to respect environmental laws and protected areas, much tougher controls on cattle, timber and agricultural development, with a removal of incentives for deforestation or degradation of forests, coupled with a greater focus on the fostering of a conservation economy that is genuinely in keeping with the preservation of the Amazon and a vibrant life for the people’s of the Amazon basin.

Current Conservation Efforts:

Imazon (Institute of Man and Environment of the Amazon) is a Brazilian research institution whose mission is to promote conservation and sustainable development in the Amazon:

https://imazon.org.br

Greenpeace Brazil was established in 1992, and has campaigned diligently against illegal and predatory logging in the Amazon: https://www.greenpeace.org/brasil/

Amazon Conservation’s mission is to unite science, innovation and people to protect the western Amazon: https://www.amazonconservation.org

Amazon Watch is a nonprofit organisation formed in 1996 to protect the rainforest and advance the rights of Indigenous peoples in the Amazon basin: https://amazonwatch.org/about

The Amazon Conservation Team partners with indigenous and other local communities to protect tropical forests and strengthen traditional culture: https://www.amazonteam.org

The International Union for the Conservation of Nature regional office in South America was established in 1991 in Ecuador: https://www.iucn.org/regions/south-america

Rainforest Action Network takes action against the companies and industries driving deforestation and climate change: https://www.ran.org

Mongabay is a nonprofit environmental science and conservation news platform:

https://rainforests.mongabay.com/amazon/

National Geographic’s educational resource on the Amazon:

https://www.nationalgeographic.org/education/amazon/

The Central Amazon Conservation Complex is a UNESCO World Heritage site and the largest protected area in the Amazon basin: https://whc.unesco.org/en/list/998/

Wikipedia’s page on the Amazon: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amazon_rainforest

The Brazilian Ministry of the Environment is responsible for the protection of nature and management of protected areas in Brazil: https://www.gov.br/mma/pt-br