New MAAP Report Covers Key Cases of Carbon Loss & Gain in the Amazon

October 30, 2024

Over the past few months, we’ve released a series of MAAP reports (MAAP #215 & MAAP #217) that introduced a critical new dataset (Planet’s Forest Carbon Diligence product) that provides wall-to-wall estimates for aboveground carbon, which has allowed us to highlight the highest (peak) aboveground carbon levels in parts of the Amazon.

Our newest report, MAAP #220, is part 3 of this series, focusing on aboveground carbon loss and gain across the Amazon over the 10 years of the data gathered.

For context, the Amazon loses carbon to the atmosphere due to deforestation, selective logging, human-caused fires, or natural disturbances, while it gains carbon from regeneration and old-growth forests sequestering carbon from the atmosphere. Overall, we find that the Amazon still narrowly functions as an overall carbon sink (meaning the carbon gain is greater than the loss).

However, this gain is quite small relative to the total aboveground carbon contained across the Amazon, reinforcing concerns that the Amazon could flip to a carbon source (with carbon loss becoming greater than its gain) due to increasing deforestation, degradation, and fires.

In this report, we illustrate these findings with a series of novel maps zooming in on emblematic cases of high carbon loss and gain across the Amazon over the past 10 years. These cases include forest loss from agriculture, gold mining, and roads and forest gain from remote primary forests.

Zooming in to the site level yields additional important findings. For example, we can now estimate the carbon loss from major deforestation events across the Amazon during the past ten years. On the flip side, we can also calculate the carbon gain from both secondary and primary forests.

 

Read the full report here.