An aerial view shows an area of Amazonian rainforest being cleared in Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, in September.
Mauro Pimentel / AFP via Getty Images
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Mauro Pimentel / AFP via Getty Images
An aerial view shows an area of Amazonian rainforest being cleared in Labrea, Amazonas state, Brazil, in September.
Mauro Pimentel / AFP via Getty Images
The latest data shows that Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has seen its highest annual rate of deforestation in more than 15 years, after increasing by 22% year-on-year.
The country’s space agency monitoring system shows that the region lost more than 5,100 square miles of rainforest – roughly the size of the US state of Connecticut – between August 2020 and July 2021, according to data published on Thursday. It was the worst annual loss since 2006, when Brazil’s Amazon forest shed more than 8,800 square miles.
Until President Jair Bolsonaro took office, the Brazilian Amazon had not recorded an annual loss of more than 3,000 square miles from deforestation for more than a decade. Bolsonaro, who advocated for protecting the environment of Brazil and minimizing the shrinking of the rainforest since becoming president in 2019, has under international pressure to reverse the process.
According to the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace, about 1 million indigenous people and 3 million species of flora and fauna live in the Amazon.
Although Bolsonaro is not attending this month’s United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, his country has joined other nations in agreeing to end illegal deforestation, in addition to promising to cut methane emissions.
NS Report released this week, from the PRODES of Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (Program for Computation of Deforestation in Amazonia) recorded on 27 October – four days before the start of the Glasgow summit.
Mauricio Voivodic, executive director of the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil, said: “This is the real Brazil that the Bolsonaro government tries to hide with illusory speeches and cleansing actions abroad. . told the Associated Press in a statement after the PRODES report was published. “The reality is that the Bolsonaro government has accelerated the path to the destruction of the Amazon.”
