Marine, Coastal, and Threatened Habitats

Deforestation in the Amazon and Congo basins, the two largest tropical forest blocks on the planet, has been driven predominantly by land conversion for agriculture, though the specific pressures differ between the two regions. In the Amazon, the principal drivers are cattle ranching, which accounts for the majority of cleared land in Brazil according to most monitoring studies, together with soybean cultivation and infrastructure expansion such as road building, which tends to open previously inaccessible forest to further clearance along its margins. In the Congo Basin, deforestation has historically proceeded at a comparatively slower rate than in the Amazon, driven more by small-scale subsistence agriculture and fuelwood collection, though industrial logging concessions and, increasingly, commercial agriculture and mining are expanding pressure across the region. Both basins have seen periods of accelerated forest loss tracked by satellite monitoring systems such as Brazil's INPE and the University of Maryland's Global Forest Watch, with year-to-year rates fluctuating alongside government policy, commodity prices, and enforcement effort.