New data reveal dramatic one-year glacial losses tied to drought and expanding agricultural land.
Alarming new evidence from national land-use study
Ecuador’s glaciers have experienced their sharpest recorded decline in four decades, with more than 1,069 hectares disappearing between 2023 and 2024. The finding comes from the third edition of a long-running land-monitoring project that shows a country undergoing rapid environmental transformation—losing forests, watching natural water sources diminish, and seeing agricultural land expand at a pace unmatched in the region.
The data, compiled from nearly 40 years of satellite imagery, reveal a steady shift in Ecuador’s landscape since 1985. While the country still maintains 67% natural land cover, the balance is tilting rapidly: forest loss of 1.21 million hectares has been matched almost one-for-one by a gain of 1.19 million hectares in agricultural territory.
Drought-driven glacial losses hit historic levels
The most dramatic finding is the scale of the recent glacial reduction. In 2023, Ecuador’s glaciers covered 5,474 hectares; by 2024 that figure had plummeted to 4,405. The one-year drop represents the steepest loss on record since the monitoring project began nearly 40 years ago. Severe drought conditions during 2023 intensified the melt, erasing glacial surface at a rate the research team had not previously observed.
The country now retains only about 4,000 hectares of glacial cover—an amount that scientists say is both environmentally and culturally significant. These high-altitude ice bodies feed watersheds, influence regional weather patterns, and support vulnerable ecosystems and communities.
Despite the scale of the loss, researchers have not yet produced long-term projections on how quickly Ecuador’s glaciers might continue to disappear. Instead, they are urging glaciologists and academic institutions to use the newly released dataset to model future trends.
How the study was assembled
The analysis relies on Landsat satellite imagery and advanced classification tools that generate a year-by-year snapshot of Ecuador’s shifting land cover. Forty annual mosaics—one for each year between 1985 and 2024—were evaluated pixel-by-pixel using artificial intelligence and machine-learning algorithms trained to distinguish between forest, water, crops, pasture, and other land types.
The algorithms assess 151 vegetation and environmental variables to determine how each pixel should be categorized. Forests, banana plantations, wetlands, and lakes each display unique spectral signatures, allowing researchers to identify not just broad land-cover categories but precise transitions over time.
EcoCiencia, the foundation coordinating the Ecuador dataset, serves as the national counterpart to the wider MapBiomas network, which brings together institutions from 14 countries to build a unified, open-access repository of land-use information for the entire region.
Agricultural expansion continues to reshape the landscape
The most persistent driver of change identified in the Ecuador dataset is the advance of the agricultural frontier. As cropland and livestock areas expand, forests shrink, and fragile ecosystems degrade under pressure from human activity.
The study’s coordinators note that these agricultural gains come with high ecological costs. Forest loss reduces carbon absorption capacity, intensifies erosion, and threatens biodiversity, while pushing farming into higher elevations increases strain on water systems.
Water gains driven by artificial growth—not natural recovery
Although overall water surface expanded between 2023 and 2024, the increase does not reflect healthier hydrological systems. Instead, researchers found that shrimp farms on the coast were responsible for the bulk of new water-surface area, masking the overall decline in natural lakes, rivers, and wetlands.
This contrast highlights a troubling imbalance: human-created aquatic systems are growing while natural ones continue to vanish, especially in regions affected by drought and deforestation.
New tools could reshape local decision-making
To help policymakers and scientists use the data more effectively, developers are working on integrating an AI-powered assistant into the platform. The tool will allow users to request information conversationally—asking, for example, for current forest-cover levels in Pastaza—and receive immediate cross-referenced outputs. The feature aims to reduce the time needed to interpret large datasets and make the platform more accessible to non-technical users.
Researchers hope the updated dataset will become a foundation for climate policy, watershed management, conservation planning, and academic analysis. With Ecuador facing rapid environmental change, the urgency behind understanding and responding to these shifts grows stronger each year, and the dataset offers a window into both the country’s past transformations and its uncertain future.
So many impacts but does anyone really care? Are the citizens of the world going to choose to do anything differently? The impacts on our children and their children will be horrible, yet we choose to go on like before.