AMAZON, BOLIVIA

Since 2000, Bolivia has lost 9.5 per cent of its tree cover. This is equivalent to around 15 million acres and 2.6 gigatonnes of CO2 emissions. In Santa Cruz, the largest of the nine constituent departments of Bolivia, vast areas of tropical dry forest have been cleared for agricultural use. The composite image above was created by combining three images taken by the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite throughout 2019 and shows the Bolivian lowlands, which have been transformed into farming communities since the 1980s. Each of these radial fields is around eight square miles in size, with a small settlement, including a church, school and soccer field, at the centre of each.