The Amazon rainforest and five reasons for hope

• Tree loss in Brazilian Amazon dips to 2015 low
• Illegal gold miners face more raids
• Ecuador shuts some oil wells

RIO DE JANEIRO - Amid all the bad climate news, the Amazon rainforest - the world's largest tropical forest - is finally teasing out some hope.

Fewer of its trees were felled this year in Brazil and governments are finally taking on some of its worst exploiters, helping preserve a key weapon in the fight against climate change.

Humans have few more precious tools to combat a fast-warming planet than the Amazon, which spans eight nations and is home to nearly 50 million people, including 2 million Indigenous people.

The cooling impact of forests goes well beyond their ability to absorb planet-heating CO2 emissions. Tropical rainforests are home to at least half the world's living species and they help to maintain stable rainfall patterns and local temperatures.

This makes preserving the Amazon rainforest, the world's largest tropical rainforest, a global priority.

Scientists say climate change, deforestation and fires are all helping push the Amazon to a "tipping point" that threatens to alter the forest irreparably.

Yet 2024 brought some progress for Amazon conservation, showing that strides can be made in stemming deforestation rates and that the rule of law can protect a biodiverse ecosystem.

Brazil stems deforestation in Amazon

Deforestation in Brazil, the country with the biggest share of the rainforest, has declined to its lowest level since 2015.

Tree loss in Brazil's Amazon fell 30.6% in the 12 months to July against the same period a year prior, according to data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (Inpe).

That is the smallest area destroyed in the world's largest rainforest in nine years.

Yet some 6,288 square km (2,428 square miles) of Amazon were still lost - an area larger than the entire U.S. state of Delaware, Inpe data showed.

Brazil's president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has vowed to reinstate the country's environmental protections and reach net zero deforestation by 2030, reversing years of rising losses.

More environmental enforcement

This year, Brazilian police and military forces carried out raids across the Amazon, evicting illegal miners, loggers, ranchers and other invaders who had settled in Indigenous land.

By September, officials said they had cleared most of the thousands of wildcat gold miners who had settled on the Indigenous Yanomami reservation in the Amazon.

Lula plans to beef up enforcement next year by taking on some 800 new federal environmental agents, the largest hiring drive in more than a decade.

In 2024, Brazil also recognised over a million hectares of Indigenous territories and conservation units in the Amazon, and plans to another 20 million+ hectares under protection by 2027.

Research shows that recognising and protecting Indigenous lands is a key way to preserve the forest and stem tree loss.

A boost in funding

While it has scored some wins on deforestation, Brazil has been far less effective in halting fires, which have increased sharply in the Amazon in 2024 during a record drought.

According to the Brazilian nonprofit Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), fires hit 6.7 million hectares of forest between January and October 2024, damaging 7.5 times as much land as in was hit in the same period the previous year.

Fire-fighting funds are now set to be taken out of the $1.3 billion Amazon Fund that Lula reactivated in 2023.

The fund is an international mechanism to efforts that fight deforestation, backed mainly by European donors.

As of November, the Amazon Fund had approved a record 882 million reais ($145 million) for forest protection.

This month, Brazil said it was on the lookout for projects that could help recover 24 million hectares of forest in three decades - almost a third of the Amazon's deforested land.

Brazil to host COP30 next year

Brazil will host the COP30 global climate talks in November, bringing greater visibility to the Amazon forest and the chance to attract global funding to its conservation.

The summit will be held in the Amazonian city of Belem.

Over a hundred social movements in Brazil are organising a parallel Summit of the People, aiming to push the global leaders into firm action on climate change and forest loss.

Ecuador begins to close oil wells

In 2024, Ecuador's government stepped up its efforts to end some oil activity after a 2023 public referendum voted to ban oil drilling in the Yasuni national park in the Amazon.

In August, the government announced it had closed one of the 247 wells, part of a phase-out set to last 5-1/2 years.

While implemention is slow, it is a rare example of the world shifting away from a fossil-fuel based economy and shows how Indigenous-led campaigning can yield nationwide results.

(Reporting by Andre Fabio Cabette ; Anastasia Moloney; Editing by Lyndsay Griffiths.)