Brazil, largest total area of protected forest lands

With 220 million hectares of forested lands under some form of legal protection, Brazil leads the world with the greatest area of protected forest. Despite this impressive figure, great swathes of the Brazilian Amazon remain unprotected while Brazil also leads the world in deforestation. "The Amazon rainforest is the world's largest intact forest. It is home to more than 24 million people in Brazil alone, including hundreds of thousands of Indigenous Peoples belonging to 180 different groups... There are approximately 40,000 species of plants and more than 400 mammals, with almost 1,300 different varieties of birds and an insect population in the millions. In addition to its unparalleled diversity of life, the Amazon plays an essential role in helping to control the planet’s climate. The Amazon Basin stores approximately 100 billion metric tons of carbon — that’s more than ten times the annual global emissions from fossil fuels . . . In the last 40 years, the Brazilian Amazon has lost more than 18 percent of its rainforest — an area about the size of California — to illegal logging, soy agriculture, and cattle ranching. Despite the creation of protected areas in recent decades, most of the remaining forest is under threat."