Amazon Basin Nature Nonprofits

The Amazon is not simply the largest rainforest on Earth, it is a machine that makes its own weather. The trees transpire so much water that they generate flying rivers, aerial currents of moisture that carry rain across the continent and water the agriculture of southern Brazil and Argentina. Roughly half the rain that falls on the Amazon was previously exhaled by the Amazon. Cut enough of it and the system cannot sustain itself.

That is the tipping point that scientists have been warning about, the moment when deforestation and warming push the eastern forest past the point where it can generate its own rainfall and it begins converting, irreversibly, to degraded savanna. Parts of the southeastern Amazon have already flipped from absorbing carbon to emitting it. This is not a distant hypothetical.

The organizations here fight deforestation and the roads and cattle and illegal gold mining that drive it, and they work with the Indigenous peoples whose territories are, by every satellite measure available, the best-protected forest in the basin. The single most effective thing anyone has found for keeping the Amazon standing is recognising the land rights of the people already living in it.