Preliminary government data has indicated annual deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon may have surpassed 10,000 square kilometres for the third straight year, continuing an increase since Jair Bolsonaro assumed office.
The area deforested from August to July was 8,793 square kilometres, just below last year’s record, according to daily alerts compiled by the National Institute for Space Research’s Deter monitoring system.
That data is considered a leading indicator for complete calculations released near the end of the year from the more accurate Prodes system.It uses at least four different satellites to capture images, addressing oversights in preliminary data caused by lower resolution and cloud cover.
Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a network of environmental non-profit groups, told the Associated Press he expects the final tally to be about 10,000 square kilometres.Before President Bolsonaro’s term began in 2019, the Brazilian Amazon had not recorded a single year with that much deforestation in more than a decade, and between 2009 and 2018, the average was 6,500 square kilometres.
The far-right president has encouraged development of the biome and dismissed global concerns about its destruction as a plot to hold back the nation’s agribusiness.
At the same time, his administration reduced the power of environmental authorities and legislative measures to loosen land protections have advanced, emboldening land grabbers.“
In two and a half years, the Bolsonaro government has managed to provoke a situation of destruction and chaos in the environment,” Suely Araujo, a former president of the environmental regulator, Ibama, told AP. “A group of factors is delegitimising enforcement.
There is an anti-policy that has no way of going right.”More recently, Brazil’s government has been trying to improve its environmental credibility with the US.
As a presidential candidate last year, Joe Biden proposed countries provide Brazil with 20 billion dollars to fight deforestation. His presidential administration has since made clear it would only be willing to contribute once Brazil shows concrete progress, and talks have stalled.
During the US-led climate summit in April, Mr Bolsonaro shifted his tone on Amazon preservation and exhibited willingness to step up commitment, and in late June he issued a decree returning soldiers to the Amazon to bolster policing against logging and other illegal land clearance – even as environmental groups allege the mobilisation is mostly symbolic, given troops are ill-prepared to conduct oversight.
Vice president Hamilton Mourao, who leads the nation’s Amazon Council, said he aimed to cut deforestation by 10% this year. He acknowledged on August 2 that perhaps only half that goal would be attained, an amount he told reporters was “very small, very paltry, but some progress”.
Deter data shows a 5 per cent decrease from the previous year. Greenpeace senior forest campaigner Cristiane Mazzetti told AP she expects the complete Prodes data to show deforestation exceeded 10,000 square kilometres in 2020-2021.
