“These (armed) groups are using the Amazon as a means to advance a comprehensive peace process, which seems to lack the necessary political and economic will to implement mitigation measures in the face of increased forest fires and deforestation,” said Siri Damman of the Rainforest Foundation Norway in the op-ed “Deforestation in the Amazon: like the crab”, published on May 7 in the newspaper El Espectador.
In the editorial, the senior advisor of the Peru and Colombia team of Rainforest Foundation Norway (RFN), an organization member of the Advisory Council of IRI-Colombia, referred to the worrying increase in deforestation figures in the Colombian Amazon during the first months of the year – compared to 2023 – and the multiple factors that threaten this important biome, putting at risk its permanence and that of the biodiversity that inhabits it. He also made an urgent call to the government to take permanent and urgent measures to radically curb deforestation and thus prevent the collapse of tropical forests in the medium or short term.
