Gustavo Petro, Colombia's first elected leftist president, will take office in August with ambitious proposals to halt the record-high rates of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest. More than 40 per cent of Colombia is in the Amazon, an area roughly the size of Spain. The country has the world's largest bird bio-diversity, mainly because it includes transition zones between the Andes mountains and the Amazon lowlands. The task of stopping deforestation seems more challenging than ever. In 2021, the Colombian Amazon lost 98000 hectares (more than 240,000 acres) of pristine forest to deforestation and another 9,000 hectares (22,000 acres) to fire.