Figures from INPE show that 13,235 square kilometers of rainforest disappeared between August 2020 and July 2021. That was the largest strip since 14,286 square kilometers were cleared between 2005 and 2006.
The deforestation record of the last fifteen years contradicts recent promises by the Bolsonaro government, which has recently made efforts to paint a reliable environmental image. At the recent UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow, the Brazilian government pledged to reduce illegal logging in the Amazon to zero by 2028, two years ahead of the initial 2030 commitment.
That reduction to zero should be achieved through a 15 percent reduction in illegal deforestation in 2024, 40 percent in 2025 and 2026, and 50 percent in 2027. Leading up to the summit, the Brazilian government had suggested that it would gradually bring deforestation in the Amazon under control. gets.
The figures published on Thursday were already known to the Brazilian government before the climate summit in Glasgow. However, he chose not to announce them during the summit so as not to get any difficult questions about them. Journalists who inquired about it with the Brazilian delegation at COP26 were told that the figures from the space agency’s monitoring system Prodes were not yet complete. “That’s a lie!” the Union of Science and Technology Government Employees in the Space Industry (SindCT) said in a statement.
Environment Minister Joaquim Pereira Leite said he saw the numbers for the first time on Thursday. “They prove that deforestation is still a challenge for us and that we need to take stronger action against illegal logging,” the minister said.
Mauricio Voivodic, head of the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil, said the numbers are “the real Brazil that President Jair Bolsonaro’s government is trying to hide with imaginary actions and attempts at greenwashing abroad’. “What the reality shows,” he said, “is that the Bolsonaro government has accelerated the destruction of the Amazon rainforest.”
Lost forest as big as Belgium
Before Jair Bolsonaro, a staunch supporter of Amazon’s economic development, took office as president of Brazil on January 1, 2019, there was never a year in which more than 10,000 square kilometers of rainforest was cleared. Between 2009 and 2018, the average was 6,500 square kilometers per year. Since then, the annual average has risen to 11,405 square kilometers.
Since Bolsonaro took office, deforestation in the Amazon has increased every year. In 2019, the logging amounted to 10,129 square kilometers (+34%) and in 2020 10,851 square kilometers (+7%). Added to this year’s 13,235 square kilometers, this makes a disappeared area of more than 34,000 square kilometers, an area slightly larger than Belgium (30,689 square kilometers).
‘It is a shame. It is a crime,” said Márcio Astrini, secretary of the Brazilian Climate Observatory, a network of environmental groups. “We see the Amazon being destroyed by a government that has made environmental destruction its policy.”
Bolsonaro’s ambition to develop the Amazon economically has always downplayed worldwide outrage over the alleged destruction of the rainforest. His administration has largely dismantled federal environmental protection agencies and supported legislation that relaxes land protection and encourages illegal logging.
Former army captain Bolsonaro argues, among other things, for more mining and commercial agriculture in protected areas of the Amazon. At a conference in the United Arab Emirates this week, he told potential investors that the criticism of Brazil for deforestation is unfair and that most of the Amazon region remains untouched.
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