World’s Largest Forest

The largest forest in the world is the Amazon Rainforest, which covers an unfathomable area of 7,000,000 square km. The Amazon Rainforest,  alternatively, the Amazon jungle or Amazonia, is a large tropological rainforest located in the continent of South America that occupies the drainage basin of the Amazon River and also its tributaries. The majority of the forest – a whopping sixty percent – is located in a single country: Brazil. As such, the socioeconomic and political situation of Brazil has always had a significant impact on the state of the rainforest. Of the remaining area, thirteen percent is located inside Peru, ten percent in Colombia, and minor amounts in Bolivia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Suriname, and Venezuela. Amazingly, the Amazon is accountable for over half of the planet’s remaining rainforests and comprises the world’s largest and most biodiverse tract of tropical rainforest.

Geography

The Amazon Rainforest accounts for almost 55% of the total geographical area of Brazil. It is bounded by varied and diverse geographical features. To the east, it is bounded by the Atlantic Ocean, Guiana Highlands to its north, to the west it neighbors the Andes Mountains and Brazilian Central Plateau to the south.

The Amazon Rainforest is home to a myriad of ecosystems, ranging from swamps to savannas. It is the most biologically diverse and dense place on Earth, as approximately thirty percent of the world’s species reside there. The forest is into existence for almost 55 million years thus making it one of the oldest places with lives. The forest has witnessed a lot including, the extinction of dinosaurs, Cretaceous–Paleogene extinction event, and changes in the weather which eventually led to global warming. 

It is home to a varied diversity which includes around forty thousand plant species, approx sixty thousand species of trees, around thirteen thousand species of birds that people might not know, approx four hundred and thirty mammalian species, and One thousand amphibian species. The forest is also surrounded by and has many water bodies which have around three thousand different species of fish. 

Additionally, more than 30 million people of 350 different ethnic groups live in the Amazon. These indigenous people follow nine different national political systems and live in three thousand, three hundred, and forty-four formally acknowledged indigenous territories.

Climatic Conditions 

Global climate change has had a significant impact on the Amazon Rainforest. The rising temperatures have caused the reduction of rainfall, leading to increased droughts and forest fires, which have played a significant role in the loss of forest cover. A study in 2009 revealed that a 4°C rise (above pre-industrial levels) in global temperatures, predicted by 2100, would cause the decimation of eighty – five percent of the rainforest. It also drew attention to the distressing fact that even curbing the temperature rise to 3 °C would result in the loss of seventy – five percent of the Amazon.

Another major cause of weather change is deforestation. While the Amazon has had a long history of gradual sustainable deforestation due to human settlement, the economic development of Brazil in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries has caused a rapid acceleration of deforestation. Due to this more than 1.4 million hectares of forest land have been cleared. Conversion of forest land for cattle grazing is the biggest contributor, followed by agriculture (specifical soy), logging, forest fires, and mining.

Protective Measures

In the 1990s, the Brazilian Government and various international bodies began cooperative efforts to protect the forest from human-caused destruction. In 2006, the Brazilian Government placed a moratorium on new forest clearing for soy, due to pressure from a Greenpeace campaign.

These collective efforts were a major factor in reducing the pace of the annual forest cover loss from 0.4 percent circa 1980 – 1990 to 0.1 percent circa 2008 – 2016.

In April 2019, the Ecuadorian court issued orders to cease oil exploration in 180,000 hectares of the Amazon rainforest, and in July of the same year, the Ecuadorian court banned the government from selling forest territory to oil companies.