Amazon lost 32.2m acres of primary forest from 2022 to 2025: Study
A new report indicates that the Amazon rainforest lost 32.2 million acres of primary forest between 2022 and 2025, largely due to land clearing and fires. This loss threatens the region's ability to recycle moisture, pushing the ecosystem closer to a critical tipping point.
Why it matters
The rapid degradation of the Amazon has global implications for climate regulation and biodiversity, as the forest approaches a point of no return.
Imagine Texas and California pushed together into one patch of land. Now picture all of it cut down, burned or otherwise gone. That is roughly the amount of original primary forest the Amazon has lost, according to a new report from Amazon Conservation’s Monitoring of the Andes Amazon Program (MAAP). The latest analysis found that 97 million hectares (240 million acres) of primary forest had been lost across the Amazon biome’s nine countries by the end of 2025. It also found that the routes carrying moisture during the dry and transition seasons had been the most disrupted. Most of that loss came from people clearing land, with fire accounting for a large share. About 15% of the basin’s original forest is now gone.The numbers come from MAAP #250, a 2026 update to the group’s earlier tracking. In 2021, the same group put the figure at 13.2%.
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