Is the rainforest threatened? Without my donation, would the piece of rainforest be destroyed in the short term?
Yes, unfortunately, this can be assumed. In general, only 2.8 percent of the Earth's land surface still provides intact habitats(Plumptre, A. J.,Baisero, D.,Belote, R. T. et al. (2021). Where Might We Find Ecologically IntactCommunities? Frontiers in Forests and Global Change 4 (21)).
Even more concretely, however, numerous studies also document the threat to the rainforest in Peru and Canada.
Peru:
According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), approximately 10 million hectares of tropical rainforest were lost annually between 2015 and 2020, with the Amazon being the most degraded annually (1).
Amazon Conservation, for example, estimates over 2 million hectares of primary forest loss in the nine Amazon countries by 2020, an area as large as Israel. Peru holds a sad record in third place (2).
More locally, there is a lot of pressure on the forest for agricultural development and for gold mining, especially in the Tambopata region since the completion of the highway to Brazil. On this online map you can see the deforestation directly in the region around Puerto Maldonado, where we are active, in the last 20 years. Click on the small play button on the left.
Also on this online map with our drone images you can see the deforestation in the region. The historical development of deforestation is also very well illustrated in this video by YouTuber Tomary, who was with us in Peru.
1: FAO and UNEP (2020). The State of the World's Forests 2020. Forests, biodiversity and people.
2: Finer, M., Mamani, N. (2020). Amazon Deforestation Hotspots 2020. MAAP: 132.
Canada:
Everyone knows about the value and the threat to the Amazon forests. But hardly anyone talks about the forgotten ecosystem of British Columbia: it is home to the last large contiguous area of temperate rainforest in the world (1). And yet British Columbia, of all places, is one of the last jurisdictions in the world that continues to allow large-scale logging of 600- to 1,800-year-old virgin forest giants (2). Between 2003-2010, logging in BC was responsible for higher annual CO2 emissions than Finland as a whole (3). The main causes are logging, agriculture, and infrastructure construction. On this online map, you can see an impressive visualization of how deforestation has progressed in southeastern BC until 2012.