The southern Amazon rainforest now emits significantly more CO2 than it absorbs due to forest damage. This is shown by an analysis of detailed aerial photographs in the Brazilian states of Rondônia, Mato Grosso and Pará between 2016 and 2018 in the specialist journal PNAS. In total, the team led by Ovidiu Csillik from the California Institute of Technology discovered forest damage on 21.6 percent of the surveyed area, which covers 544,300 square kilometers (8.2 percent of the Amazon region).