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RIO DE JANEIRO: It hasn’t received much attention with the world focused on the coronavirus, but deforestation has increased in the Amazon rainforest this year, raising fears of last year’s record devastation, or worse.
Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a new peak in the first four months of the year, according to data released on Friday by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, which uses satellite imagery to track destruction.
A total of 1,202 square kilometers of forest, an area more than 20 times the size of Manhattan, was wiped out in the Brazilian Amazon from January to April, he discovered.
That was a 55 percent increase from the same period last year, and the highest number during the first four months of the year since monthly registrations began in August 2015.
The numbers raise new questions about how well Brazil is protecting its part of the world’s largest rain forest under President Jair Bolsonaro, a far-right climate change skeptic who advocates opening protected land to mining and agriculture.
“Unfortunately, it seems that what we can expect for this year are more fires and deforestation,” Greenpeace activist Romulo Batista said in a statement.
Last year, in Bolsonaro’s first year in office, deforestation soared 85 percent in the Brazilian Amazon, to 10,123 square kilometers of forest.
That loss, almost the size of Lebanon, fueled global alarm about the future of the rain forest, considered vital to curbing climate change.
The destruction was fueled by record forest fires that swept through the Amazon from May to October, in addition to illegal logging, mining, and agriculture on protected land. The trend so far in 2020 is all the more troubling given that the usual high season for deforestation only begins in late May.
“The beginning of the year is not the time when deforestation normally occurs, because it is raining and it is raining a lot,” said Erika Berenguer, an ecologist at Oxford and Lancaster universities.
“In the past, when we see an increase in deforestation at the beginning of the year, it is an indicator that when the deforestation season begins … we will also see an increase.”
Bolsonaro this week authorized the army to deploy to the Amazon to fight fires and deforestation beginning May 11. He also deployed the military last year, after facing scathing international criticism for minimizing fires.
Environmentalists said a better plan would be to provide more support for Brazil’s environmental protection programs.
Under Bolsonaro, the environmental agency Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, has faced cuts in personnel and budgets. Last month, the government fired the agency’s top environmental compliance officer after authorizing a raid on illegal miners that aired on television.
Another problem with the government’s military strategy, Berenguer said, is that it has focused exclusively on fire.
That ignores the fact that fires are often caused by illegal farmers and ranchers who raze trees and then burn them, he told the France-Presse agency.
Addressing fires alone “is like taking acetaminophen because I have a toothache: it will reduce pain, but if it is a cavity, it will not cure it,” he said.
