Argentina: Environmental Challenges

Much of Argentina's environmental pressure traces back to the conversion of natural ecosystems for agriculture. The Pampas, among the most productive farmland on Earth, lost much of its original grassland cover as cereal and livestock production expanded through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. A similar pattern later reached the Gran Chaco in the north, a subtropical dry forest region opened to agriculture following the nineteenth-century Conquest of the Desert campaign. According to United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization data, Argentina's native forest area fell from roughly 35.2 million hectares in 1990 to about 28.6 million hectares by 2020.

Argentina remains highly biodiverse, spanning ecosystems from subtropical forest to Patagonian steppe, but continued habitat conversion has left many remaining forests altered by human activity. A 2018 Forest Landscape Integrity Index assessment ranked Argentina 47th among 172 countries studied, with roughly 7 percent of its forest area under formal protection. By 2024, forest covered about 17.1 percent of the country's total land area, according to World Bank data, underscoring how much of the original forest cover across the Pampas and Chaco regions has already been cleared.

Water pollution has also drawn attention: a 1999 spill from the vessel Estrella Pampeana into the Río de la Plata ranks among the largest freshwater oil spills on record. More recently, in 2025, Argentina's Supreme Court ordered a halt to oil extraction at the Caimancito field near Calilegua National Park and set a restoration plan running through 2030, a sign of growing judicial attention to conservation enforcement.