BRASILIA, Brazil — Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has slowed by nearly half compared to the previous year, according to government satellite data released Wednesday. It’s the biggest reduction since 2016, when authorities began using the current measurement method.
Over the past 12 months, the Amazon rainforest has lost 4,300 square kilometers, an area the size of Rhode Island. That’s a decrease of nearly 46 percent from the previous period. The year of monitoring deforestation in Brazil runs from August 1 to July 30.
Much remains to be done to stop the destruction, and July saw a 33% increase in tree cutting compared to July 2023. A strike by federal environmental agency workers contributed to the increase, João Paulo Capobianco, executive secretary of the Environment Ministry, said at a news conference in Brasilia.
The figures are preliminary and come from the Deter satellite system, run by the National Institute for Space Research and used by environmental protection agencies to detect deforestation in real time. The most accurate calculations of deforestation are usually published in November.
President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has pledged to achieve “zero deforestation” by 2030. His current term ends in January 2027. Deforestation in the Amazon has declined sharply since the end of President Jair Bolsonaro’s far-right regime in 2022. Under that government, forest loss reached its highest level in 15 years.
Nearly two-thirds of the Amazon is in Brazil. It remains the world’s largest rainforest, covering an area twice the size of India. The Amazon absorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide, which keeps global warming from happening even faster than it otherwise would. It is also home to about 20% of the world’s fresh water and a biodiversity that scientists have yet to fully understand, including at least 16,000 species of trees.
During the same period, deforestation in Brazil’s vast savannah, known as the Cerrado, increased by 9%. The loss of native vegetation reached 7,015 square kilometers, an area 63% larger than that of the Amazon.
The Cerrado is the most biodiverse savannah in the world, but its area is less protected than the rainforest to the north. Brazil’s boom in soybean cultivation, the country’s second largest export, comes largely from privately owned areas of the Cerrado.
“The Cerrado has become a ‘sacrifice biome.’ Its topography lends itself to large-scale mechanized production of commodities,” Isabel Figueiredo, a spokeswoman for the nonprofit Institute of Society, Population and Nature, told The Associated Press. Brazilians and the international community are more concerned with forests than savannahs and open landscapes, she said, even though those ecosystems are also extremely biodiverse and essential to climate balance.
To control deforestation in the long term, monitoring, such as by satellite, and law enforcement are not enough, Paulo Barreto, a researcher at the Amazon Institute of Peoples and the Environment, a nonprofit organization, said by email. New protected areas are needed, both inside and outside indigenous territories, and greater transparency so slaughterhouses can know where their cattle come from. Cattle ranching is the main driver of deforestation in the Amazon. Degraded pastures also need to be replanted as forest, Barreto said, and stricter rules are needed for the financial sector to prevent financing deforestation.
Interviewed in Brasilia, the Minister of Environment and Climate Change, Marina Silva, acknowledged that so far, law enforcement has been the main tool against deforestation, but that the government’s action must and will be broader. “From now on, we must combine continued law enforcement with support for sustainable productive activities, which is one of the pillars of our plan.”
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