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WWF Goals

Conserve the Amazon’s land and freshwater ecosystems to ensure species survive, and continue providing the environmental goods and services to the people that live there.

Maintain the quality and quantity of the Amazon's priority rivers to ensure the integrity of aquatic ecosystems and the ecological services that support local livelihoods and regional economies.

Protect forest cover, which is important to maintaining rainfall and regulating climate regionally and globally.

Amazon Facts & Figures

The Amazon rainforest covers an area of 6.7 million km2 over 8 countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, Venezuela, plus French Guiana.

About 1/2 of the planet's remaining tropical rainforests are found in the Amazon, and at least 10% of the world's known species.

The Amazon Basin contains 15% of the world’s flowing freshwater.

About 30 million people live in the Amazon, including more than 300 indigenous groups.

Amazon rainforest

For more than 40 years, WWF has been at the forefront in protecting the Amazon. Building on this experience, the global environmental organization is working with goverments, local communities and others to ensure conservation and sustainable development throughout the world's largest rainforest.
 

Can the Amazon survive?

The good news is that 80% of the Amazon’s original forest is largely intact.

The bad news is that continued logging, mining, and land conversion to cattle ranching and soy production is threatening the Amazon's future.

Despite the best conservation efforts, the annual loss of forest cover has reached 27,000 km2 - an area nearly the size of Belgium. Further forest loss may trigger changes to the Amazon, including a reduction in rainfall and increased droughts. This will have a significant impact on the region's biodiversity and even global climate change.

News & Publications

What WWF is doing

WWF is working in the Amazon region with government authorities, local and indigenous communities, non-governmental organizations, the private sector and others to protect large parts of the Amazon and its unique biodiversity and ecological functions and services. This is being achieved through:
  • Promoting the responsible use of natural resources and sustainable management
  • Ensuring environmental and social standards for infrastructure development, particularly road and dam projects
  • Developing national programmes for reducing emissions from deforestation
  • Consolidating and expanding protected areas

The world’s largest tropical forest conservation programme

The Amazon Region Protected Areas (ARPA) - created in 2002 by the Brazilian government in partnership with WWF, Brazilian Biodiversity Fund, German Development Bank, Global Environment Facility and World Bank - is a 10-year project aimed increasing protection of the Amazon.

By 2008, 32 million hectares of new parks and reserves were created in the Brazilian Amazon under ARPA, among them the 3.88 million-hectare Tumucumaque Mountains National Park, one of the world's largest national parks. In its second phase from 2009 to 2012, ARPA expects to create another 20 million hectares of new protected areas.

Building on the success of ARPA, WWF is also looking to help establish a Pan-Amazonian protected area programme that will extend the network of protected areas into the other Amazonian countries: Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guiana, Guyana, Peru, Suriname and Venezuela.
Rio Pinquen, Manu National Park, Amazon Rainforest, Peru.

Photos and graphics © WWF or used with permission. Text available under a Creative Commons licence.

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