Threats to the Amazon Rainforest:
The biggest human threat to the Amazon Rainforest is deforestation. A fifth of the Amazon Rainforest has already been lost to make way for industrial cattle grazing and agriculture, deveoplment, including building roads and hydro-dams, mining, logging, both legal and illegal and oil exploration and extraction. Another environmental threat to this ecosystem is climate change which is altering the weather patterns and causing more severe droughts and storms, which have a negative effect on the flora, fauna and indigenous humans living there. Although there are many threats to the Amazon, many world wide organisations, such as WWF and Green Peace, have implanted programs to help conserve the Amazon Rainforest such as the adopt a sloth program. In more recent years, the Brazilian government has implanted laws to try and protect the Amazon from more deforestitation and has set aside land for protected areas. Now protected land in the Amazon Rainforest covers nearly 44% of the total rainforest.
Deforestation rates:
Deforestation rates: