The Amazon forest is the largest tropical rainforest in the world, which houses about 10% of the Earth's biodiversity and 16% of the world's total river discharge into the oceans. However, the Amazon forest has already lost up to 20% of its original area since the 1970s and is under constant threat of ongoing deforestation and forest degradation. Disturbances in the forest cover lead to carbon emissions, endanger the livelihoods of indigenous people, and threaten biodiversity in the Amazon. Deforestation and forest degradation causes and effects are interrelated; selectively logged forest or forest affected by edge effects propagate the susceptibility of forest fires, while heavily burned forests are vulnerable to storms and highly susceptible for deforestation. New roads built into the forest are also a driver for these processes. An increase in forest fragmentation makes the contact between animals and humans more probable and thus leads to a higher risk of animal-to-human spillover of infectious diseases. After very high annual deforestation rates in the Brazilian Legal Amazon (BLA) at the beginning of the 2000s (reaching 27,772 km2 in 2004), Brazil had successfully curbed deforestation from the mid-2000s onwards. The lowest deforestation rate since the start of the Amazon deforestation monitoring programme (PRODES) in 1988, reported by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), was reached in 2012 (4,571 km2). This reduction was related to new forest protection laws and an increased effort by the Brazilian Government to enforce the law by effectively combating illegal deforestation. However, since 2012, INPE-PRODES reports for the BLA a progressive and systematic increase in annual deforestation areas; for the period 2019 to 2020 the increase is at 9.5%, from 10,129 km2 in 2019 to 11,088 km2 in 2020. The JRC dataset on Tropical Moist Forest (TMF) shows that the annual area of forest disturbances (deforestation and forest degradation together) has increased by 18% in the Pan-Amazon region from 2019 to 2020 (from 26,605 km2 to 31,418 km2); in the BLA the increase amounts to 24% (from 17,303 km2 to 21,379 km2). Some Pan-Amazon countries show an increase in forest disturbances from 2019 to 2020, ranging from 11% (Ecuador) to 52% (Bolivia). Other countries or regions like Venezuela or the Guiana Shield (Guyana, Suriname and French Guiana) show a decrease in forest disturbances of 5% and 54%, respectively, from 2019 to 2020. Colombia showed almost the same area of forest disturbances of ca. 3,660 km2 for both years.
