Amazon remains in great peril and should top Cop30 agenda

From the foothills of the Andes in Ecuador the largest tropical forest on earth stretches more than 3,500km - more than the distance from Galway to Moscow - before spilling into the Atlantic Ocean. It took Spaniard Franciso de Orellana more than eight months to descend the full length of the great river when his party became the first Europeans to do so in 1542. The accounts of Orellana's improbable adventure chronicled a jungle that was then inhabited by a large population, possibly as many as five million in total, according to modern scholars. These included advanced agricultural societies that…