The Amazon’s worst fire season in decades is turning the rainforest into a massive carbon emitter.
A new analysis from scientists at the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre shows that the Amazon rainforest has experienced its worst fire season in more than 20 years. The extreme fires drove unprecedented levels of carbon pollution and revealed how vulnerable the ecosystem has become, even as overall deforestation rates have slowed. During 2024, fires released an estimated 791 million tons of carbon dioxide, an amount comparable to Germany’s total annual emissions. That figure is about seven times higher than the average recorded over the previous two years.
According to findings published in Biogeosciences, fires damaged roughly 3.3 million hectares of Amazon forest in 2024 alone. Researchers link this dramatic increase to intense drought conditions worsened by climate change, growing forest fragmentation, and poor land management practices (e.g., escape fires or criminal fires by land grabbers). Together, these factors have accelerated forest degradation. For the first time in records covering 2022–2024, damage caused by fire surpassed deforestation as the leading source of carbon emissions in the Amazon.
Satellites Reveal Hidden Fire Damage
The study relied on advanced satellite techniques designed to overcome gaps in earlier global fire datasets. Scientists combined observations from the Tropical Moist Forest monitoring system with data from the Global Wildfire Information System. By carefully removing false signals from agricultural burning and cloud interference, the team was able to identify and confirm fire-related forest damage with far greater accuracy than before.
Brazil and Bolivia Among the Hardest Hit
The scale of the fires varied across the region but remained deeply concerning. In Brazil, emissions linked to forest degradation reached their highest level ever recorded in 2024. In neighboring Bolivia, fires damaged more than 9% of the country’s remaining intact forest. This represents a major loss for an area long recognized as an important stronghold for biodiversity and carbon storage.
How Scientists Measured the Carbon Impact
To strengthen reliability and openness, the researchers applied a Monte Carlo simulation approach to calculate carbon emissions and quantify uncertainty. Across variables such as above-ground biomass density, combustion completeness, and the percentage of forest cover affected by fire. The resulting estimates follow Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) best practices and provide a solid reference point for monitoring the climate impact of tropical forest fires.
A Growing Threat Beyond Deforestation
While deforestation has long been seen as the Amazon’s main danger, the study draws attention to a quieter but equally damaging process: fire-driven degradation. These fires weaken forests without fully clearing them. From above, affected areas can appear largely intact, yet they have lost significant biomass and ecological function. Because the trees remain standing, this kind of damage is often overlooked in national reporting and international climate policies.
Calls for Urgent Action
The researchers urge swift, coordinated steps to reduce the use of fire, improve forest protection, and reinforce the role of local and Indigenous communities in land stewardship. They also stress the importance of expanding international climate finance to account for forest degradation, not only deforestation, as a key driver of carbon emissions and ecosystem decline.
Reference: “Extensive fire-driven degradation in 2024 marks worst Amazon forest disturbance in over 2 decades” by Clément Bourgoin, René Beuchle, Alfredo Branco, João Carreiras, Guido Ceccherini, Duarte Oom, Jesus San-Miguel-Ayanz and Fernando Sedano, 8 October 2025, Biogeosciences.
DOI: 10.5194/bg-22-5247-2025
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13 Comments
A threat beyond deforestation may not actually exist. There is probably not enough data available to be certain exactly how important the rain forests are to the ecological balance.
There are nearly 50 volcanoes around the world right now. Global warming in the extreme! There should be a ranking of what is causing global warming. The earth has been warming since the ice age.
I feel the volcanos, if done properly can help stabilize rather than erupt. I wondered about more growth again for balancing the toxic fumes levels and helping them acupuncture concepts like Ole Faithful and the geysers that help burp her in an essence. If America Super Volcano was to explode the devastation would be felt on crop growth, climate, birds in flight, all of it the world round. There’s a volcano awoken in Iran I hear and activity as usual but maybe heightened in Hawaii. A volcano domino like effect is possible with them all. Add fault lines and crust destabilization and a lot of factors above and below ground that science may not have accounted for when they didn’t update old school mathematics and they chose to ignore theory of everything. God particle is also chaos theory and vice versa times a lot. Chaos is what we’ve only ever known. It’s the unknowing of it that makes it chaos and then hiding our creative forces from each other and ourselves when we didn’t take them into the equation. Large solar farms in barren lands like desert and Arctic and the polar stabilization was always off. Then the Mariana Trench and the quickly melting core and the heat in the ocean is increasing as we already know. The currents are off in every way and volcanic activity and tsunami ridden lands of underwater volcanoes and fault lines and the magma could hypothetically be diverted carefully to help stabilize those fault lines, treat it like a broken bone and cast it with the cement of landmass but treat it like cement. Inject the fault lines carefully with lubricant maybe from the oil and petroleum if we can save the petroleum from a massive chemical remover service of recycling plastics making them non toxic to the extreme. But volcanoes can be harnesses by working with her not against her and knowing what she needs..Acts of love on a planet with people smarter than the wars on everything they create.
Including submarine volcanoes, there are at least ten’s of thousands of volcanoes!
https://www.sciencealert.com/almost-20000-ancient-volcanoes-discovered-at-the-bottom-of-the-ocean
Has anyone seen those nice young men in their clean white coats?
THANKS
“Cuz Confucious said I think therefore I am.”
Not in this universe!
“The Latin cogito, ergo sum, usually translated into English as ‘I think, therefore I am’, is the ‘first principle’ of René Descartes’ philosophy. …”
As long as one profits, one is certainly “am”. First principle of Margaret Thatcher.
“… the Amazon rainforest has experienced its worst fire season in more than 20 years.”
In other words, the wildfires are NOT unprecedented, and are comparable to fires not very long ago. However, it is in direct contradiction to the caption under the lede illustration: “Record-breaking fires swept the Amazon in 2024, releasing more carbon than ever before …”
Which is it?
Well; if the baseline for encountering the time that such worst fires began is pushed back to, say, Cambrian times, it all becomes a nonsense. One might wonder indeed how worst were the worst wildfires fires before 2004…………
There is little doubt that the end-Cretaceous bolide event was far worse than anything that has happened in Recent times. However, based on acreage, it appears that the early-20th Century fires in North America — well before CO2 started climbing significantly — were far greater than anything that has been happening in the 21st Century. It is unjustified hysteria.
Funny that they’re much more worried about the emissions, than they’re worried about the devastation itself.
A textbook example of “tone deaf”.