RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – (Thomson Reuters Foundation) It’s a familiar story: A vast forest in South America loses huge swathes of trees each year, threatening the communities living there, destroying rare habitats, and exacerbating the effects of climate change on the region.
But this woodland is not Brazil’s Amazon – it is the Gran Chaco, the continent’s second-largest forest, where environmentalists say massive tree loss is being overlooked as the world focuses on the more famous “lungs of the planet”.
Spanning about 1 million sq km (386,000 sq miles) mainly in Argentina, with the rest in Paraguay and Bolivia, the forest is being devastated by logging and expanding soybean farming, green groups say, as they call for stronger enforcement of Argentina’s forest law.
FEATURE-The other Amazon: Soybeans drive loss of S America s second-largest forest
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The other Amazon: Soybeans drive loss of S America s second-largest forest
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