As someone born in Australia, now living in London, it's been a poignant few weeks to be working as a senior campaigner on the Greenpeace forests campaign.

When I was a young kid in Australia, we lived on a three acre property in a valley that was a mixture of bush, pasture and citrus orchards in the foothills of Perth, Western Australia.  In summer we would sniff the wind nervously. Some years, we watched with grim fascination as uncontrolled fires swept the opposite side of the valley. One year, before I was born, the flames came close to my families' home, but we were fortunate. 

At primary school, diligent teachers instructed us in the risks of bushfires. There's nothing like a match dropped on a pile of dried eucalyptus leaves, even in controlled conditions, to make the point to a group of rapt five year olds. Eucalyptus trees are full of oil - they explode and the fire jumps. When I was eight, Colin Thiele's classic Australian children's book The February Dragon, telling the story of an idyllic rural life consumed by summer fires, drove the lesson home. Some times as a child I couldn't sleep because I imagined the smell of smoke. 

Some rather grim images were sent out from our picture desk yesterday. Taken on Sunday by Ardiles Rante, they show the devastation caused by fire in the peatland forests outside Pekanbaru, the capital of Riau province in Sumatra. So that's another few thousand tonnes of carbon dioxide sent up into the atmosphere, and seeing photos like these make me realise our ongoing campaign to protect these forests from the ever-expanding palm oil industry is even more essential.

It's currently the dry season in the Amazon and, as the live webcast last week demonstrated, fires have been decimating large areas. The video crew weren't the only ones documenting the fires and last week we received images from another Greenpeace team who took to the air to photograph them and the devastated areas they leave behind. We've put together some of the most striking (not to say depressing) images into the slideshow below.

On Friday, a Greenpeace team broadcast a live webcast from the heart of the Amazon rainforest, in an area which was still-smouldering after a recent forest fire. Even rainforests have dry seasons and during the current one, fires both natural and man-made are devastating huge areas.

It was an amazing technical achievement but that wasn't the reason they did it - they were there to show how the forest is being cleared for a variety of reasons (in this case, to open up areas for cattle).

One of the pleasures of working at Greenpeace is having access to a truly incredible photo library and there's been more than one occasion when, looking for images to accompany a blog story, I've become lost in the wealth of powerful and affecting images.

The photographers who supply us with these photos are rewarded for their work with the occasional trophy and Daniel Beltra, who has accompanied Greenpeace campaigners on expeditions all over the world, was last week presented with the Global Vision Award for photos he took in the Amazon as part of Pictures of the Year International. He also received an Award of Excellence in the Science/Nature category for a collection from the Antarctic, taken during last year's Southern Ocean expedition on the Esperanza.

Just as we were heading out for a Friday evening pint we got word from our office in Manaus that we had something to celebrate. The Brazilian government announced that deforestation rates for the Amazon have dropped for the third year in a row.

It's been a hectic year in the Amazon. Following three years of research into the activities of the soya industry, in April 2006 we launched a very public campaign to expose how those little beans are chewing up the Brazilian rainforest. Or to be more precise, how the demands of European markets for cheap meat are being met by huge plantations growing soya for animal feed in the ashes of rampant deforestation.

In tropical latitudes, months pass without any rain and in the dry season forests become susceptible to fire. These can occur naturally and would normally not pose a serious problem, but clearing land as a result of logging or to make way for plantations is exacerbating the problem and every year the fires spread faster and further.

Deforestation

The Amazon rainforest plays a very important role in the production of water vapor across the region. Around half of the area's rainfall comes from moisture evaporating from the forest (before it penetrates into the soil) and plant transpiration. The fewer trees there are, the less water is returned to the atmosphere.