Philip Fearnside's Half Century of Amazon Research

Philip Fearnside has spent five decades studying the Amazon rainforest and the costs of development in the region. He began his research in the 1970s, living among agricultural settlements along Brazil's Trans-Amazonian Highway.

Fearnside's work challenged official assumptions about emissions and economic viability, often arriving at numbers well above government baselines.

He documented how fast Amazon soils lost nutrients under continuous cropping and regional approaches to cattle ranching.

In the 1980s, Fearnside showed that shallow tropical reservoirs flooded large areas of forest, producing significant methane emissions from rotting vegetation during the first decades after flooding.