This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: As the 2026 El Niño intensifies across the Amazon, new research highlights the urgent need to better protect the region's remaining forests from disturbances. While measures to avoid deforestation or restore cleared land dominate many conservation strategies, approaches to protect existing forests from disturbances, including selective logging and wildfires, can often provide the biggest "bang for your buck," a new study published today in Science shows.
The findings are from an international team of researchers from the UK, Brazil, Sweden and Australia, led by scientists at Lancaster University. The group undertook the first systematic comparison study of its kind by contrasting different ways to either protect existing forests or restore them on agricultural land. The analysis covered more than 3 million hectares in the regions of Santarém and Paragominas, in the Brazilian state of Pará, between 2010 and 2020.
It combined high-resolution satellite imagery with field data from 381 survey transects across 38 catchments and 499 rural properties, as well as models mapping 160 bird species and 426 tree species. Using observed land-use changes, the researchers used counterfactual scenarios to assess how each strategy would have affected biodiversity and carbon stocks compared with the changes that actually occurred. The team also estimated the costs associated with each intervention, allowing the benefits delivered for the resources invested to be compared within a common framework.
"These findings highlight the need to put in place policies and resources to prevent and tackle the wildfires that disturb and degrade tropical forests," said Professor Jos Barlow, of Lancaster University and senior author of the study. "This is all the more urgent in this El Niño year. These events, combined with climate change, result in longer, hotter and more intense dry seasons across the Amazon's "arc of deforestation," greatly increasing the extent and severity of forest fires." Avoiding forest disturbances delivered particularly significant results.
It generated the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity and was almost as important as preventing deforestation for protecting carbon stocks. "While no one strategy is a silver bullet, our results provide clear evidence that we should begin by prioritizing the forests we have left," said Dr. Leonardo Miranda, of Lancaster University and lead author of the study.
"And protection must go beyond avoiding deforestation. Avoiding forest disturbances from wildfires or logging delivered the greatest benefits for forest biodiversity." Restoration delivered important benefits, particularly on properties where most of the original forest had already been lost. Across the study area as a whole, however, restoration on agricultural land was less effective when implemented on its own and was also the most expensive strategy.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
