MAAP #211: Illegal roads and Deforestation in Indigenous Reserves & National Parks of the Colombian Amazon
Illegal roads are a major threat to the Colombian Amazon, often opening remote primary forests to the main drivers of deforestation: cattle pastures, land grabbing and coca production. These illegal roads threaten protected areas (including national parks) and indigenous territories…
MAAP #200: State of the Amazon in 2023
The first MAAP report, published in March 2015, took a detailed look at the escalating gold mining deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon. The following 198 reports, over the past 8.5 years, continued to examine the most urgent deforestation-related issues across…
MAAP #201: Amazon Deforestation & Carbon Update for 2023
As national policymakers begin the global COP28 climate summit in Dubai, we provide here a concise update on the current state of Amazon forest loss and remaining carbon reserves, both based on the latest cutting-edge data. For Amazon forest loss,…
MAAP #199: Amazon Carbon Update, based on NASA’s GEDI Mission
As we approach the COP28 climate summit, starting in Dubai in late November, we provide here a concise update on the current state of remaining Amazon carbon reserves. We present the newly updated version of NASA’s GEDI data1, which uses…
MAAP #197 : Illegal Gold Mining Across the Amazon
Illegal Gold Mining continues to be one of the major issues facing nearly all Amazonian countries. In fact, following the recent high-level summit of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, the nations’ leaders signed the BelĂ©m Declaration, which contains a commitment…
MAAP #189: Amazon Fire Season Heats Up
The Amazon fire season is well under way: to date, we have detected over 260 major fires thus far in 2023 (see Base Map below). This year is of special concern because scientists indicate we have entered a new El…
MAAP #187: Amazon Deforestation & Fire Hotspots 2022
We present a detailed look at the major 2022 Amazon forest loss hotspots, based on the final annual data recently released by the University of Maryland (and featured on Global Forest Watch). This dataset is unique in that it is…
MAAP #183: Protected Areas & Indigenous Territories Effective Against Deforestation Across Amazon
As deforestation continues to threaten primary forest across the Amazon, key land use designations are one of the best hopes for the long-term conservation of critical remaining intact forests. Here, we evaluate the impact of two of the most important: …
MAAP #178: Gold Mining Deforestation Across the Amazon
Gold Mining is one of the major deforestation drivers across the Amazon. Although not typically at the scale of agricultural deforestation, gold mining has the potential to severely impact critical areas such as protected areas & indigenous territories. Relatedly, gold…
MAAP #168: Amazon Fire Season 2022
Here we provide a concise review of the 2022 Amazon fire season, based on the unique data from our real-time Amazon Fires Monitoring app.* In a novel approach, the app combines data from the atmosphere (aerosol emissions in smoke) and…