Abandoned Amazon land can advance decarbonization plan

Driven largely by the need to open up farmland to meet increasing global demand for products such as soybean, loggers have cleared over 810,000 square kilometers of forest in the Amazon – an area nearly as big as Norway and Sweden combined.

Deforestation is not only a tragedy for biodiversity, it also releases huge quantities of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. Despite a glimmer of hope in the early 2010s, when deforestation rates plummeted to an all-time low, forest loss is once again on the rise.

The bulldozers aren’t always the end of the story. Nearly 30 percent of deforested land in the Amazon has been abandoned, giving the forest a chance to regrow – albeit with differing degrees of success, depending on how long and how intensely the land was used for agriculture. While these recovering habitats, known as secondary forests, are a poor substitute for the species-rich old-growth forests they replace, they can rapidly capture large quantities of carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.

But in a new study, we discovered that secondary forests across the Amazon are absorbing just 9.7 percent of the emissions...