Discover why the extraction of resources is one of the biggest threats to global rainforests and what World Land Trust are doing about it.
It’s commonly accepted that the world’s rainforests are central to the health of the world. As temperatures go up in line with the levels of carbon dioxide, the vast areas of tropical rainforest act as environmental regulators, pulling carbon out of the atmosphere and stabilising constantly shifting global weather systems. It doesn’t take a scientific genius to work out that decreasing these areas is going to result in environmental meltdown.
The latest analysis of the consequences of deforestation in the Amazon, Congo basin and south-east Asia has a similar message to other reports by highly respected scientists: that removing large areas of tropical rainforest has a direct effect on regulating temperature, storing carbon, recycling water and providing a home for nature. But alongside agriculture and cattle-ranching, this time it focuses on the damage done by mining precious resources.
Produced by the Dutch research organisation Profundo and commissioned by Rainforest Foundation Norway, the report is stark in its message: “Coordinated action is required now to avoid locking the Amazon, Congo Basin, and Southeast Asia-Oceania rainforests into another decade of pressured expansion and irreversible loss of rainforests and livelihoods.”
Drilled to destruction
As global consumerism increases global demand for critical metals and minerals used in electronic devices and batteries, mining companies are looking further afield for resource-rich land to keep up with this demand. In addition, the search for fossil fuels is widening, and the Amazon is one of the fastest-growing fossil fuel areas, with exploration and extraction in Brazil, Suriname, Ecuador, Colombia and Peru. Indeed, nearly one-fifth of the world’s oil and natural gas reserves identified between 2022 and 2024 were found in the South American rainforest and offshore regions.
While the two-pronged effect of extracting fossil fuels from tropical rainforests – damage to the rainforest, damage to the climate when burned – is significant, another pressure being placed on these threatened areas is the rising biofuel sector. Hailed as a sustainable alternative to oil and gas, it still has an impact on the environment as areas of forest are being cleared for soy, tallow, palm and ethanol. The report estimates that 52 million hectares of additional cropland will be needed to meet the projected 2030 global demand for biofuel.
“All this creates a pressure that the rainforests cannot withstand,” said Ingrid Turgen of the Rainforest Foundation Norway. “Our main message is that this compilation – one on top of the other – is affecting all three rainforest basins and if governments don’t do something about it then places like the Amazon face a pretty bleak scenario.”
The voice of reason
Known for its work in purchasing and protecting large areas of threatened forestry, World Land Trust is well aware of the additional threat posed by companies keen to exploit the world’s forests for their abundant resources. Working with local parter organisations, it continues to protect the land long after purchase through a variety of approaches.
Those approaches include community agreements with the people who live or work on the land and designating areas to be managed by Indigenous and community groups. While protecting wildlife from poachers is a key purpose, protecting the ecosystems that provide the habitat for that wildlife is equally important. That involves employing rangers and deploying monitoring systems, as well as taking the purchase option away from prospective buyers.
Only by preventing the stripping away of the rainforests’ crucial resources will the world slow down the impacts of climate change and start to recover.
