Deforested areas in the municipality of Careiro da Várzea, in the Amazon near the Indigenous Lands of the Mura people
Deforestation in amazon
e no Cerrado
reached record levels in February, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research
(Inpe). The areas under deforestation alert in the Legal Amazon rose to 321.9 km², an increase of 62% compared to last year, the worst index for the month of February in the entire historical series, which started in 2015.
In the Cerrado, the devastation was even worse, with an increase of 97% compared to 2020, reaching 557.8 km². Together, the two biomes lost almost 880 km².
Inpe data show that the states most affected by the loss of vegetation in the Legal Amazon, which corresponds to 59% of the Brazilian territory, were Mato Grosso (161.8 km²), Pará (46.4 km²), Amazonas (46.3 km² ) and Roraima (31.1 km²), the latter housing most of the Yanomami Indigenous Land
. Acre and Maranhão had approximately 4 km² under alert, each.
no longer Cerrado
the region known as Matopiba
made up of the states of Bahia (268 km²), Tocantins
(67,5 km²), Piauí
(63.2 km2) e Maranhao
(51.6 km²), had the worst numbers. More than 90% of the deforested areas are used for agriculture and livestock, with the removal of vegetation mainly to make way for pastures, for meat and milk production, and for soy.
For WWF Brasil, a non-governmental organization focused on environmental conservation, it is still too early to confirm any trend related to deforestation, as January and February are periods of high clouds and rain.
“What we can clearly state is that climate events are more recurrently affecting Brazil and that controlling deforestation is fundamental to mitigating losses. The actions announced by the current government are welcome, but it is necessary that the entire society participates in this process of environmental reconstruction,” said Mariana Napolitano, Conservation Manager at WWF-Brasil, in an article reproduced on the conservation institution’s website.
In note, the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change
(MMA) informed that it will take measures, together with the IBAMA
, ICMBio
and the Brazilian Forest Service
to “remotely hold responsible and embargo deforestation that does not have a valid authorization, among other administrative measures, which may even block the access of properties with illegal deforestation to credit and to the chain of agribusiness buyers”.
According to the ministry, cloud cover in the Amazon region may have negatively influenced the accuracy of the numbers recorded in February. This is because the data from the Real Time Deforestation Detection System
(Deter) may include deforestation processes that occurred in periods prior to the month of mapping, but whose detection was not previously possible due to cloud cover limitations.
In addition, certain forest alterations may have vegetation suppression authorizations, that is, legal deforestation.
The Deter system was developed to support inspection by generating alerts about where the problem is happening. However, the information from DETER is not used to officially measure deforestation and should not be understood as a monthly rate of deforestation.
Inpe’s official data to measure the annual rate of deforestation in the Amazon is provided by the Prodes project, which has an accuracy level close to 95%.
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