EL ESPECTADOR, October 30, 2025
(Translated by Eunice Gibson, CSN Volunteer Translator)
In the last 40 years, Colombia has lost an estimated 5.86 million hectares of forest—an area equal to two times the size of the Department of Tolima—as revealed by a new database on the platform Mapbiomas Colombia.
“Of that diminution, 42% is concentrated in three departments: Caquetá, with around 1,06 thousand hectares (19%); Meta, with 741.41 million hectares (13%); and Antioquia, with 593.21 thousand hectares (10%). The largest part of this destruction is concentrated in the Amazonia region, with at least 2.7 million hectares lost,” the platform points out in a message.
One way of putting these figures into perspective is the clues offered by the most recent Forest Declaration Assessment (FDA), which reveals that just during 2024, the entire planet lost nearly 8.1 million hectares of forest land because of deforestation.
The new figures on the historic situation in Colombia are one of the conclusions from a new collection of maps issued by the international platform Mapbiomas, a collaborative network of satellite monitoring that has the support of the Gaia Amazonas Foundation. There are forty maps with information on land coverings and land use in the country from 1985 to 2024.
The new maps permit identification of phenomena like the increase in human activities such as agriculture, mining, palm plantations, and forestry, among others, and they incorporate twenty new classes mapped as solar farms and plantain cultivation.
“With this release, Mapbiomas Colombia furnishes forty years of information on land coverings in Colombia and permits analysis of its dynamics with the passage of time, year after year. This effort is possible thanks to an interdisciplinary alliance between scientists, students, institutions, and organizations that join forces to furnish data in the service of knowledge and conservation,” states Adriana Rojas of the global Network Mapbiomas in Colombia.
The platform’s objective, according to the initiative, is to provide tools to carry out personalized analysis, with the possibility of selecting different time periods, territorial divisions (from biomes to microbasins) from crops to mangrove swamps.
“The platform offers tools, freely and without cost, which promotes research, innovation, and transparency in environmental management,” states Mapbiomas through a communication. “It makes free, appropriate, and reliable data available to public institutions, researchers, private businesses, social organizations, indigenous peoples, and local communities, to aid them in understanding the ecosystems and land use in the country over time, with the objective of democratizing environmental information, supporting decision-making, and the defense of the territory.”