Agency. Brazil is home to 12 percent of the Earth’s fresh water reserves, much of it in the Amazon. But a report on Friday said it is losing natural surface water as climate change and land conversion from forests to agriculture take their toll.
The country lost 400,000 hectares of water surface between 2023 and last year, according to the latest data from the Map Biomass monitoring platform. This is an area roughly the size of the US state of Rhode Island.
In the last 16 years, only 2022 has seen an increase, and since 1985 the country has lost about 2.4 million hectares of river and lake surface due to drought, urban development and over-pumping from groundwater.
“The dynamics of land acquisition and use, as well as extreme climate events caused by global warming, are making Brazil even drier,” said Juliano Schirmbeck, coordinator of the MapBiomass Agua report, in a report released ahead of World Water Day. “These figures serve as a warning about the need for adaptive water management strategies and public policies to reverse this trend.” .’
Brazil will host the COP-30 UN climate conference in November in Belem, the capital of the Amazon state of Pará. The Amazon contains about two-thirds of Brazil’s surface water, which absorbs planet-warming carbon dioxide and plays a key role in regulating the climate.
The Amazon’s surface water area shrank by 4.5 million hectares last year compared to 2022, the report said. That’s an area the size of Denmark.
The Pantanal wetlands, devastated by drought and fires last year, were the biome most affected by water levels in 2024. This was 61 percent lower than the average measured since 1985.
Although man-made reservoirs such as reservoirs and dams have expanded by 54 percent since 1985, this has not compensated for the loss of natural freshwater resources, the report said.
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