Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, I thought it would be interesting to consider today’s trends and imagine where they might lead. What follows are brief scenarios—some unlikely, others already taking shape for tropical forests.
- The vanishing state: Across parts of the Amazon, authority is slipping away. Illegal miners, armed groups, and opportunists enforce their own “environmental rules.” Governments still sign climate pledges, but in the forest itself, law dissolves into improvisation. What burns is not just forest, but governance.
- When algorithms meet agriculture: Imagine an agricultural AI built to maximize yield, blind to context. Connected to autonomous machinery, it could fell and burn with mechanical precision. The same architecture, if trained for ecosystem services, could help predict fires and guide restoration. Technology rarely arrives neutral; it mirrors the intent of its creators.
- Engineering the forest itself: Biotech firms are developing gene-edited trees designed for rapid growth or carbon capture, and microbes to restore soil. These tools may accelerate recovery—or unleash ecological surprises. The next frontier may be underground: microbial interventions.
- Human movement reshaping the map: Droughts, floods, and crop failures are driving migration into forested frontiers, while exhaustion of land elsewhere triggers abandonment and regrowth. What looks like a social problem becomes ecological, and vice versa.
- Fire and feedback: The Amazon, once too wet to burn, is becoming flammable. 60% of its forest loss in 2024 came from fire. Each burn leaves the canopy thinner, the soil hotter, the air drier. The threat is no longer only deforestation, but the disorder it leaves behind.
- The geopolitics of trees: Forests are now bargaining chips in climate diplomacy. Brazil, Indonesia, and the DRC position themselves as “green OPECs,” trading carbon stocks for finance. Meanwhile, Indigenous groups are experimenting with blockchain-based registries of territorial rights and forest data, asserting digital sovereignty over the lands they already manage. Who owns the forest’s data may soon matter as much as who owns its land.
- Regrowth and its limits: Despite setbacks, regeneration persists. Over 11 million hectares of moist forest are recovering in Latin America, proof that even scarred can bounce back.
The coming decades may bring algorithmic zeal, demographic drift, and the slow combustion of a drying planet. The common thread is acceleration: processes moving faster than the institutions meant to contain them.
The forest won’t disappear all at once. It will fade in some places, return in others. The question is not whether nature can recover, but whether humanity will grant it the time and space to do so.
For now, the damage spreads faster than the resolve to stop it.
A follow up will be published later this week.
