This story came to me from tropical ecologist and Amazonian expert Miles Silman, my longtime friend and colleague at Wake Forest University, where we both teach. He made sure I got a copy of the study from which this story is based weeks before it was published.

In this pioneering research, made possible by intensive aerial lidar-driven data collection between 2016 and 2018, is a surprising finding: while deforestation gets all the attention from damaging the ecosystems services provided by the Amazon, forest degradation actually has a five-times greater impact on reducing the Amazon’s ability to store carbon and thus slow the rate of global warming.

“When countries report their forest and carbon changes, they mostly rely on deforestation because it’s much easier to see and quantify,” Ovidiu Csillik, lead author of the PNAS study who is formerly of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at the California Institute of Technology, told me in a phone interview. “But we’ve found that forest degradation is actually more important in terms of carbon loss.”

Imagine this: policymakers grab headlines and political capital by promising to curtail deforestation, as the new president of Brazil has done. That’s a good thing. But it turns out it’s more important to stave off or manage damage to tropical forests from flooding, landslides, wind disturbances, selective logging and road building. The reason: degraded land can often be rescued if action is taken soon enough; deforested land typically heralds an complete land-use change to ranching or farming.

While I had never met the lead author, Miles knows him because he joined the faculty at Wake Forest as a remote sensing expert in July 2024, a month before his study was published. I was clear with my editors at Mongabay about what could appear to be a conflict of interest; they agreed I should do the story and disclose the connection. That’s what we did. Also, this is my first story published on Mongabay’s newly updated and improved web site. All previous stories now show up in the new formatting.

For the second time in four days, I was invited on to the top-rated news program in the Triad to discuss history — the fist-ever address to a Joint Session of Congress by a pope. This one was extraordinary. My commentary with Neil McNeill is here.

In his 40-minute address, Pope Francis demonstrated first and foremost his admiration not only for the United States (“land of the free, home of the brave,”) but also of America’s great promise as a land of hope and dreams. He delivered his speech in English with grace and humility by making every aggressive point he intended on immigration, climate change, the death penalty, financial reform, marriage, terrorism and respect for the poor. It was brilliant.