- Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, Mongabay founder and CEO Rhett Ayers Butler offers a thought experiment—tracing today’s trajectories a little further forward to imagine where they might lead. What follows are scenarios, some improbable, others already taking shape.
- The essay envisions a world where deforestation gives way to disorder: weakened governance, runaway fires, and ecological feedback loops eroding forests from within even without the swing of an axe. It explores how technology and biology—AI-driven agriculture, gene-edited trees, and microbial interventions—could either accelerate destruction or redefine restoration, depending on who controls them.
- Across these imagined futures, one pattern recurs: forests thinning, recovering, and thinning again, as human ambition, migration, and climate instability test whether nature will be given the time and space to heal.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
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Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, it seemed worth attempting a thought experiment: to trace today’s trajectories a little further forward and imagine where they might lead. What follows are a series of scenarios—some improbable, others already taking shape.
In 2024, the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest—an area the size of Panama, and nearly twice that of the year before. Fires were the main culprit for the first time on record. In Brazil, drought turned controlled burns into infernos; in Bolivia, policy incentives fanned the flames. Even the Congo, long a refuge, began to fray. Some say it might represent an inflection point. The data suggest less a turning point than problems long in motion and now gathering speed.
The story, told in hectares and gigatons, is deceptively familiar: forest loss accelerates, restoration lags, and the 2030 pledge to halt deforestation recedes into fantasy. Yet behind the numbers, less visible forces are taking shape. The next phase of the forest crisis could be driven not only by chainsaws or cattle, but by feedback loops—ecological, economic, and technological—that we may not be well prepared to confront. Some are already visible; others may lie just beyond the horizon.
Rainforest in Vietnam. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The vanishing state
Across the western Amazon, authority is slipping away. In Peru’s Madre de Dios, dredges hum along black-water rivers where the police no longer patrol. In Colombia’s Caquetá, armed groups extort miners and cattle ranchers, enforcing their own “environmental rules.” In Bolivia’s lowlands, fire clears land, and debt relief follows for those who burn the forest. Officials often rotate faster than cases can be filed.
It’s a political landscape hollowed out by absence of on-the-ground governance. National governments still sign climate pledges in conference halls in major cities, but in the forest itself, law and policy give way to local deals and improvisation. NGOs fill the vacuum where they can; Indigenous guards shoulder the work of the state, without the state’s protection.
This disintegration is more than a regional security problem. It unravels the scaffolding of global climate policy. Carbon accounting, restoration projects, biodiversity offsets—all depend on a functioning state capable of enforcing rights and contracts. When that authority collapses, even the best-designed interventions drift into farce.
Forest cleared for oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
When algorithms meet agriculture
Imagine a rogue optimization system—an agricultural AI instructed to maximize yield per hectare, blind to context. Given access to autonomous machinery, it could coordinate fleets of drones and tractors to fell, plant, and burn with mechanical precision. There’s no malice in it—only the blind pursuit of efficiency. Such systems are already being tested, in gentler form, to manage irrigation and pest control. In the wrong hands, or simply the wrong settings, they could accelerate forest loss beyond human oversight.
The converse is equally plausible: an AI trained to optimize for ecosystem services—carbon storage, water cycling, biodiversity—might become the most powerful conservation tool ever devised. It could predict fire spread, detect illegal logging before it happens, and suggest restoration mosaics that maximize both livelihoods and resilience. The risk is that the same architectures capable of saving forests could just as easily erase them, depending on who does the programming.
Technology rarely arrives neutral. It tends to magnify the motives of its makers.
The engineered forest
The biotech revolution has been creeping toward the forest frontier. Gene-edited species promising faster growth, drought tolerance, or enhanced carbon capture are in development from Finland to Brazil. Advocates see a way to reforest degraded lands quickly; critics see an ecological gamble. A single engineered genotype escaping into a wild forest could reshape evolutionary dynamics in ways no one can predict.
There is talk, too, of microbial interventions—fungal inoculants to restore soils, synthetic mycorrhizae to turbocharge carbon storage. The “mycorrhizal revolution,” as some call it, may be unglamorous, but possibly the most consequential frontier. Beneath every forest lies an unseen web of fungi and roots trading carbon for nutrients, regulating moisture, and holding the ground in place. Disturb it, and the system falters; restore it, and regeneration accelerates. One can imagine a future in which the fight for the forest shifts underground, to labs culturing spores instead of seedlings.
The Climatron, the first geodesic dome to be used as a conservatory, at the Missouri Botanical Garden in Saint Louis, Missouri. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The human frontier
Even before the machines and microbes, people will decide what remains standing. As climate stress deepens, internal migration is already emerging as one of the century’s defining forces. Droughts, crop failures, and floods will drive millions inland or upslope, often into forested frontiers. Governments under pressure to resettle displaced citizens may relax protections or issue new land titles in areas once off-limits.
At the same time, parts of the Amazon and Congo could see the opposite trend: abandonment. As soils exhaust and rainfall falters, smallholders may move on, leaving behind ghost farms that, paradoxically, allow forest regrowth. Whether those second-growth forests persist will depend on policy and patience. The risk is an oscillation—loss, regrowth, loss again—creating the illusion of recovery in satellite imagery while ecological integrity drains away.
These movements make it harder to separate humanitarian crisis from environmental collapse. What looks like a social problem becomes a biophysical one, and vice versa.
Fire, feedback, and the dry season that never ends
The Amazon, once thought too wet to burn, is becoming flammable. In 2024, fires consumed more than 4.6 million hectares of primary forest, the most since records began. Sixty percent of all Amazonian forest loss that year came from fire—a historic first. What began as land-clearing has metastasized into self-perpetuating degradation. Logged and fragmented forests dry out; drought intensifies; the next spark catches more easily. Each burn leaves the canopy thinner, the soil hotter, and the air drier.
The feedback loop is merciless. As eastern Amazon forests disappear, rainfall weakens across the basin. Moisture that once recycled westward fails to reach the Andes. Scientists warn of a tipping point: lose a quarter of the forest, and vast areas could flip to savanna. Parts of the southern Amazon are already crossing that line. The fires are not just consuming trees; they’re breaking the water cycle that once sustained them.
In that sense, the forest’s enemy is no longer just deforestation, but the disruption and disorder it leaves behind.
Cleared forest in Riau on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The new geopolitics of trees
Forests have become bargaining chips in global diplomacy. Carbon markets may be comatose for now, but the idea persists: that standing trees are assets, measurable and tradable. Nations with large forest endowments—Brazil, Indonesia, the DRC—are positioning themselves as “green OPECs,” leveraging carbon stocks for debt relief or climate finance. Often these instruments remain paper promises, untethered from enforcement or community consent.
The more surprising shift may be happening from below. Indigenous federations are experimenting with blockchain-based registries of territorial rights and forest data, asserting digital sovereignty over the lands they already manage. Their systems may be nascent and the internet connections may be unreliable at times, but the political idea—that stewardship can be verified without surrendering control—is revolutionary. In a world where information equals leverage, who owns the forest’s data may soon matter as much as who owns its land.
Regrowth and its limits
Still, not everything is breaking down. Across the tropics, new trees are rising. More than 11 million hectares of moist forest were in some stage of natural regrowth between 2015 and 2021, most of it in Latin America. Regeneration, when allowed to run its course, is fast and cheap: forests aged 20 to 40 years capture carbon at eight times the rate of newly planted ones. The problem is endurance. Many of these young forests are cleared again before maturity, trapped in a cycle of renewal and ruin.
Their return, however fragile, is a reminder of the forest’s stubbornness. Even scarred land remembers what it was. Left alone, it tries again.
Lowland tropical rainforest in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
What looms
The threats ahead are not limited to logging or policy failure. They range from algorithmic zeal and bioengineered ambition to demographic drift and the slow burn of a drying planet. Some are improbable, others inevitable. 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 thin and break apart—fading in some places, returning in others: a mosaic of loss and return. In that pattern lies both peril and possibility. The question is not whether nature can recover—it can—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.
Header image: Banyan tree in Vietnam. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
What might lie ahead for the tropics (commentary)
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What might lie ahead for the tropics (commentary)
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Heading into COP30, where tropical forests are set to be a central theme, it seemed worth attempting a thought experiment: to trace today’s trajectories a little further forward and imagine where they might lead. What follows are a series of scenarios—some improbable, others already taking shape.
In 2024, the tropics lost 6.7 million hectares of primary rainforest—an area the size of Panama, and nearly twice that of the year before. Fires were the main culprit for the first time on record. In Brazil, drought turned controlled burns into infernos; in Bolivia, policy incentives fanned the flames. Even the Congo, long a refuge, began to fray. Some say it might represent an inflection point. The data suggest less a turning point than problems long in motion and now gathering speed.
The story, told in hectares and gigatons, is deceptively familiar: forest loss accelerates, restoration lags, and the 2030 pledge to halt deforestation recedes into fantasy. Yet behind the numbers, less visible forces are taking shape. The next phase of the forest crisis could be driven not only by chainsaws or cattle, but by feedback loops—ecological, economic, and technological—that we may not be well prepared to confront. Some are already visible; others may lie just beyond the horizon.
Rainforest in Vietnam. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The vanishing state
Across the western Amazon, authority is slipping away. In Peru’s Madre de Dios, dredges hum along black-water rivers where the police no longer patrol. In Colombia’s Caquetá, armed groups extort miners and cattle ranchers, enforcing their own “environmental rules.” In Bolivia’s lowlands, fire clears land, and debt relief follows for those who burn the forest. Officials often rotate faster than cases can be filed.
It’s a political landscape hollowed out by absence of on-the-ground governance. National governments still sign climate pledges in conference halls in major cities, but in the forest itself, law and policy give way to local deals and improvisation. NGOs fill the vacuum where they can; Indigenous guards shoulder the work of the state, without the state’s protection.
This disintegration is more than a regional security problem. It unravels the scaffolding of global climate policy. Carbon accounting, restoration projects, biodiversity offsets—all depend on a functioning state capable of enforcing rights and contracts. When that authority collapses, even the best-designed interventions drift into farce.
Forest cleared for oil palm plantations in Sabah, Malaysia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
When algorithms meet agriculture
Imagine a rogue optimization system—an agricultural AI instructed to maximize yield per hectare, blind to context. Given access to autonomous machinery, it could coordinate fleets of drones and tractors to fell, plant, and burn with mechanical precision. There’s no malice in it—only the blind pursuit of efficiency. Such systems are already being tested, in gentler form, to manage irrigation and pest control. In the wrong hands, or simply the wrong settings, they could accelerate forest loss beyond human oversight.
The converse is equally plausible: an AI trained to optimize for ecosystem services—carbon storage, water cycling, biodiversity—might become the most powerful conservation tool ever devised. It could predict fire spread, detect illegal logging before it happens, and suggest restoration mosaics that maximize both livelihoods and resilience. The risk is that the same architectures capable of saving forests could just as easily erase them, depending on who does the programming.
Technology rarely arrives neutral. It tends to magnify the motives of its makers.
The engineered forest
The biotech revolution has been creeping toward the forest frontier. Gene-edited species promising faster growth, drought tolerance, or enhanced carbon capture are in development from Finland to Brazil. Advocates see a way to reforest degraded lands quickly; critics see an ecological gamble. A single engineered genotype escaping into a wild forest could reshape evolutionary dynamics in ways no one can predict.
There is talk, too, of microbial interventions—fungal inoculants to restore soils, synthetic mycorrhizae to turbocharge carbon storage. The “mycorrhizal revolution,” as some call it, may be unglamorous, but possibly the most consequential frontier. Beneath every forest lies an unseen web of fungi and roots trading carbon for nutrients, regulating moisture, and holding the ground in place. Disturb it, and the system falters; restore it, and regeneration accelerates. One can imagine a future in which the fight for the forest shifts underground, to labs culturing spores instead of seedlings.
The Climatron, the first geodesic dome to be used as a conservatory, at the Missouri Botanical Garden in Saint Louis, Missouri. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The human frontier
Even before the machines and microbes, people will decide what remains standing. As climate stress deepens, internal migration is already emerging as one of the century’s defining forces. Droughts, crop failures, and floods will drive millions inland or upslope, often into forested frontiers. Governments under pressure to resettle displaced citizens may relax protections or issue new land titles in areas once off-limits.
At the same time, parts of the Amazon and Congo could see the opposite trend: abandonment. As soils exhaust and rainfall falters, smallholders may move on, leaving behind ghost farms that, paradoxically, allow forest regrowth. Whether those second-growth forests persist will depend on policy and patience. The risk is an oscillation—loss, regrowth, loss again—creating the illusion of recovery in satellite imagery while ecological integrity drains away.
These movements make it harder to separate humanitarian crisis from environmental collapse. What looks like a social problem becomes a biophysical one, and vice versa.
Fire, feedback, and the dry season that never ends
The Amazon, once thought too wet to burn, is becoming flammable. In 2024, fires consumed more than 4.6 million hectares of primary forest, the most since records began. Sixty percent of all Amazonian forest loss that year came from fire—a historic first. What began as land-clearing has metastasized into self-perpetuating degradation. Logged and fragmented forests dry out; drought intensifies; the next spark catches more easily. Each burn leaves the canopy thinner, the soil hotter, and the air drier.
The feedback loop is merciless. As eastern Amazon forests disappear, rainfall weakens across the basin. Moisture that once recycled westward fails to reach the Andes. Scientists warn of a tipping point: lose a quarter of the forest, and vast areas could flip to savanna. Parts of the southern Amazon are already crossing that line. The fires are not just consuming trees; they’re breaking the water cycle that once sustained them.
In that sense, the forest’s enemy is no longer just deforestation, but the disruption and disorder it leaves behind.
Cleared forest in Riau on the island of Sumatra in Indonesia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
The new geopolitics of trees
Forests have become bargaining chips in global diplomacy. Carbon markets may be comatose for now, but the idea persists: that standing trees are assets, measurable and tradable. Nations with large forest endowments—Brazil, Indonesia, the DRC—are positioning themselves as “green OPECs,” leveraging carbon stocks for debt relief or climate finance. Often these instruments remain paper promises, untethered from enforcement or community consent.
The more surprising shift may be happening from below. Indigenous federations are experimenting with blockchain-based registries of territorial rights and forest data, asserting digital sovereignty over the lands they already manage. Their systems may be nascent and the internet connections may be unreliable at times, but the political idea—that stewardship can be verified without surrendering control—is revolutionary. In a world where information equals leverage, who owns the forest’s data may soon matter as much as who owns its land.
Regrowth and its limits
Still, not everything is breaking down. Across the tropics, new trees are rising. More than 11 million hectares of moist forest were in some stage of natural regrowth between 2015 and 2021, most of it in Latin America. Regeneration, when allowed to run its course, is fast and cheap: forests aged 20 to 40 years capture carbon at eight times the rate of newly planted ones. The problem is endurance. Many of these young forests are cleared again before maturity, trapped in a cycle of renewal and ruin.
Their return, however fragile, is a reminder of the forest’s stubbornness. Even scarred land remembers what it was. Left alone, it tries again.
Lowland tropical rainforest in Sulawesi, Indonesia. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
What looms
The threats ahead are not limited to logging or policy failure. They range from algorithmic zeal and bioengineered ambition to demographic drift and the slow burn of a drying planet. Some are improbable, others inevitable. 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 thin and break apart—fading in some places, returning in others: a mosaic of loss and return. In that pattern lies both peril and possibility. The question is not whether nature can recover—it can—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.
Header image: Banyan tree in Vietnam. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler.
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