A third of remaining Amazon rainforest ‘already degraded’

Sometimes, you can’t see the trees for the wood. In concentrating on the trees removed from the Amazon and the resulting loss of forest area, a study claims we have missed the devastation caused to the trees that remain. More than a third of the world’s largest rainforest has been degraded by human activity while still classed as forest, according to the journal Science.

Whether due to drought linked to climate change, selective logging in the forest itself, or the effect of being on the edge of human habitation, the region experiences significant biodiversity loss and releases carbon into the atmosphere.

Jos Barlow, professor of conservation science at Lancaster University, said that this effect should be viewed as a problem on a comparable scale to deforestation itself.

He said: ‘‘If you’ve never been to a rainforest, you could walk in a degraded rainforest and not quite understand the difference. But if you go from an intact forest to a degraded one, then you immediately feel the difference.’’

He added: ‘‘You feel it in the heat. The understorey is three or four degrees warmer, maybe more. You feel it in the fact that it’s dry. If you walk around in a rainforest it doesn’t make any noise, but in the disturbed forest suddenly the leaves crunch under your feet.’’