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Keywords
fire
Amazon
Orinoco
protected areas
indigenous territories
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Abstract
Tropical rainforests in northern South America store a large proportion of the world’s terrestrial carbon and host high biodiversity. Yet transitions among fire, degradation, and deforestation, and the effect of territorial governance on them, remain insufficiently quantified. Here we characterized the post-fire trajectories (2001–2024) of forests in the Amazon and Orinoco basins of Colombia (CO) and Venezuela (VE) that showed no sign of disturbance as of 2000. We integrated the European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative Fire (ESA CCI Fire, 250 m, 2001–2020) and Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer MCD64A1 (MODIS MCD64A1, 500 m, 2021–2024) burned area products with the Tropical Moist Forest AnnualChanges observations of the Joint Research Centre (30 m), from which we drew a sample of pixels with detected burning and tracked their state year by year. By 2024, 69% of the sample remained undisturbed forest, with a marked contrast between countries: Colombia showed a higher proportion of deforestation (14.6% versus 6.3% in Venezuela) and Venezuela a higher proportion of degradation (21.7% versus 17.5%). Deforestation preceded degradation in 62% (CO) and 77% (VE) of cases, with median lags of five and six years (burning to degradation) and three and six years (degradation to deforestation). In the Colombian Amazon where no formal protection existed, 23 % was deforested, whereas no deforestation was recorded in forests where protected area and indigenous territory overlapped. The fire, degradation, and deforestation cascade was the dominant trajectory, and the coexistence of state and indigenous governance was associated with lower fire-driven loss of forest cover.
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