As the fires ravaging Brazil's Amazon stoke global outrage, its neighbors are also scorching, ripping up and poisoning their forests — largely under the radar.
Bolivia and Peru have seen faster growth in the number of fires this year than Brazil, as illegal miners, ranchers and cocaine producers continue to wreak havoc.
The 2.5 million-square mile Amazon is being attacked on all sides, with fires claiming an area equivalent to dozens of soccer fields every hour in Brazil alone. At the deforestation rates seen in recent years, the whole forest will lose an area about the size of Virginia over the next decade, according to Michael T. Coe, senior scientist at the Woods Hole Research Center.
That's endangering an ecosystem that not only hosts a vast and largely unknown share of the world's biodiversity but also helps regulate the continent's climate.
Fires have multiplied in Brazil as loggers and farmers, emboldened by President Jair Bolsonaro's disdain for environmental oversight, set ablaze land cleared earlier this year. Countries like Colombia, Peru and Bolivia aren't encouraging deforestation, but they lack the resources and political will to enforce existing regulations, according to Carolina Gil, an attorney for environmental protection group Amazon Conservation.
"The current crisis in Brazil is just the tip of the iceberg," Gil said.
Continued destruction threatens to turn dense forests into scrubland covered in shrubs and weeds, she added, wrecking a region which provides a home to tens of thousands of animal and plant species, and roughly one-fifth of the world's fresh water.
Colombia, which has the largest swath of the Amazon after Brazil and Peru, lost 530,400 acres of the rainforest in 2017, according to satellite data monitored by Amazon Conservation. Brazil, which has about six times as much of the jungle, has been losing about 1.58 million acres a year.
