• Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s new president vows to protect the rainforest.
• He has ambitious plans to halt the Amazon’s high rates of deforestation.
• In 2021, 98,000 hectares (240,000 acres) of virgin forest in the Colombian Amazon were lost to deforestation.

Gustavo Petro, Colombia’s first elected leftist president, will assume office in August with ambitious plans to halt the Amazon rainforest’s record-high rates of deforestation. Petro has pledged to restrict the development of agribusiness in the forest and establish reserves where Indigenous tribes and others will be permitted to extract rubber, acai, and other non-timber forest products. He has also offered carbon credit revenue to fund replanting.

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“From Colombia, we will give humanity a reward, a remedy, a solution: not to burn the Amazon rainforest anymore, to recover it to its natural frontier, to give humanity the possibility of life on this planet,” Petro, wearing an Indigenous headdress, said to a crowd in the Amazon city of Leticia during his campaign.

To accomplish this, he must first establish control over vast, lawless regions.

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Stopping deforestation appears more difficult than ever before. In 2021, 98,000 hectares (more than 240,000 acres) of virgin forest in the Colombian Amazon were lost to deforestation and another 9,000 hectares (22,000 acres) to fire. According to Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), an initiative of the non-profit Amazon Conservation Association, 2021 was the fourth worst year on record despite a decline from the previous year’s levels.