Weather disasters are surging in the Amazon. Reporting isn’t.

The Amazon is often treated as a single forest, yet the risks its people face from extreme weather vary sharply across borders. A new analysis by researchers from Brazil, Ecuador, Bolivia, Colombia and the United States suggests those risks are also widely undercounted. The team compiled more than 12,500 reports of storms, floods, landslides, droughts and wildfires between 2013 and 2023, covering five countries. Even with major gaps, the picture is grim. In a single year, more than 3 million people were affected and more than 100,000 pieces of public infrastructure damaged.  Landslide in the Peruvian Andes. Photo by Rhett Ayers Butler The authors show that disasters cluster along two flanks of the basin: the Andean foothills, where steep terrain and intense rain drive landslides, and the O