“111 hectares are removed every hour” in 2021!

Brazil lost 16,557 square kilometers of its entire original vegetation cover Ecosystems The last year “after 13,789 square kilometers in 2020, refers to the Mapbiomas collaborative platform, which collects data from various satellite mapping systems.

Most deforestation (59%) occurred in Amazon. Next comes the Cerrado, the Brazilian savannah (30.2%), Katinga, which is a semi-arid region in the northeast (7%), then the Atlantic Forest or “Mata Atlantica” (1.8%) and the Pantanal (1.7%).

“In the Amazon alone, 111.6 hectares of forest are being deforested every hour, or 1.9 hectares per minute, which equates to roughly 18 trees per second.”says Mapbiomas, which brings together NGOs, universities and technology companies.

L ‘Agriculture Livestock is still the main vector the pressure » Deforestation, responsible for 97%. According to the study, in the state of Para (North), the underground mines exert severe pressure.

The president of Brazil was impeached

Since 2019, when far-right President Jair Bolsonaro took power, he has… Deforestation in all ecosystems It reached 42,000 square kilometers, “Almost the surface of the state of Rio de Janeiro”According to the same source.

Environmentalists and the opposition accuse Bolsonaro’s government of encouraging deforestation by defending the exploitation of the Amazon and weakening environmental watchdogs.

According to official data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), between January and June 2022, the Brazilian part ofAmazon (60%) have already lost 3,988 square kilometers of forest area, a record for the first half since 2016, the date of the first real-time Deforestation Detection System (Deter) surveys.

Official figures also show that since President Bolsonaro came to power, he has Average annual deforestation in the Amazon by 75% compared to the previous decade.

Meanwhile, deforestation in the Amazon is accelerating

Futura article with Relaxnews published on May 11, 2020

While everyone agrees that a file COVID-19 At least the merit of explaining how the biodiversity crisis could lead to health crisis Globally, this environmental awareness has not slowed the slaughter of the Amazon rainforest. In Brazil, tragedies are piling up: deforestation and Covid-19, unfortunately, are moving forward together.

The whole world is focused on Epidemic From Corona Virus. Meanwhile, the pace of deforestation in the Amazon has accelerated this year, raising fears of record destruction in the Amazon. The last year.

In fact, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a new high in the first four months of the year, according to data released Friday by theNational Institute for Space Research in Brazil (INPE) who uses images Satellites To follow the devastation: Nearly 1,300 square kilometers of forest disappeared from the beginning of January to the end of April 2020, the equivalent of 1,800 square kilometers football fields.

This is a 55% increase over the same period last year, the highest since these monthly observations began, in August 2015. These numbers raise new questions about how Brazil protects its share of the largest tropical forest The world under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, a Climate skeptic Notorious advocate of opening protected lands for mining and agriculture.

” Unfortunately, what we can expect this year seems to be record fires and deforestation. Greenpeace activist Romulo Batista said in communication.

Ironing on a wooden leg

In 2019, Jair Bolsonaro’s first year in office, deforestation rose 85% in the Brazilian Amazon, with 10,123 square kilometers of green space destroyed. This devastation, about the size of Lebanon, has caused a global uproar about the future of the forest, which is vital in the fight against terrorism. climate change.

The destruction caused Forest fires Record destruction of the Amazon from May to October, in addition to illegal logging and mining, and agricultural practices on protected land.

” The beginning of the year is not the time when deforestation occurs naturally, because it rains a lotnotes Erica Berenger, an ecologist at the Universities of Oxford and Lancaster. In the past, when we saw deforestation increase at the beginning of the year, this indicated that when the deforestation season begins (end of May), there will be an increase as well. »

Jair Bolsonaro this week authorized the military to deploy in the Amazon region to fight fires Deforestation from May 11. He did so last year after coming under fire from the international community for minimizing these fires.

Environmentalists, for their part, believe that it would be better to support more environmental protection programmes. Under Bolsonaro’s presidency, the environment agency Ibama has had to deal with staff and budget cuts. And last month, the government dismissed the highest official in charge ofRequest The agency’s environmental laws, which had recently allowed for a raid on illegal mines in front of television cameras, were allowed.

The government’s military strategy Gate Only in fires, without taking into account the fact that they are often caused by illegal farmers and ranchers who cut down trees and then burn them, Erica Berenger laments: “ It’s like taking paracetamol When you have a toothache: It will reduce painbut if it’s a cavity, it won’t cure it She told AFP.

When tragedies pile up

L ‘epidemic of the coronavirus in the country, which has officially killed nearly 10,000 people out of about 150,000 infected, which complicates matters further. The state of Amazonas, which is largely covered by nature, is one of the hardest hit regions. With one intensive care unit, it was overshadowed by the outbreak. Concerns also related to Indigenous communitiesHistorically, it is highly susceptible to disease from elsewhere. Environmentalists also fear that protecting the forest has been neglected due to the fight against Covid-19.

The mayor of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas, linked the two tragedies this week in a plea for help. ” We need medical personnel, respirators, protective equipment, everything that can save the lives of those protecting the forest. We fired Arthur Virgilio.

Amazon: Record deforestation in January in Brazil

Futura article with AFP-Relaxnews, published on February 10, 2020

More than 280 square kilometers have been deforested in the Brazilian Amazon. That’s a number that doubled in January compared to the same month in 2019, according to data from the Institute for Space Research (INPE), a Brazilian body that measures deforestation.

Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon more than doubled in January compared to the same month last year (+108%), with more than 280 km² Forests were cleared, a record, according to preliminary official data released Friday. This is the largest area deforested for January since DETER went live in 2015, based on alerts from Elimination of Forests It was identified by satellite, from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). For comparison, it was 136 km² In January 2019, 183 km² In 2018, 58 km² in 2017.

Record deforested area in the Brazilian Amazon

In mid-January, INPE data showed an 85% increase in deforestation in 2019 (9,166 km²), the first year in office for far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, compared to the previous year (4,946 km).²).

President Bolsonaro made headlines in August by trying to downplay the escalation of wildfires that shocked the entire world. On August 2, Bolsonaro’s government dismissed the former head of INPE, Ricardo Galvão, after he was accused of exaggerating the extent of deforestation. In December, Mr. Galvao was selected among 10 of the most important Sunni scholars By the leading British magazine temper nature.

A very controversial bill

On Wednesday, Jair Bolsonaro gave his approval to a controversial bill that specifically plans to allow mining exploration on the land. Sweetened, which may have the effect of stimulating deforestation, according to several NGOs. This law, which still has to be approved in Parliament, was described by the head of state as a “dream”, but a “nightmare” by the leaders Sweetened and environmental activists.