December 19, 2019

Growing Amazon Deforestation

2 minutes

The Amazon rainforest, covering much of northwestern Brazil and extending into Colombia, Peru and other South American countries, is the world’s largest tropical rainforest, famed for its biodiversity. Prior to the early 1960s, access to the forest’s interior was highly restricted, and the forest remained essentially intact. Since then, human settlement and agricultural development of the land has destroyed about 17% of the Amazon rainforest.

According to Brazil’s National institute for Space Research, the INPE, the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has reached its highest level in 11 years. About 3.769 square miles of rainforest – an area 1 ½ times the size of the state of Delaware – were lost just between August 2018 and July 2019, the result of agricultural land clearing, wildfires, mining and logging. This is a 30% increase over the previous 12-month period. (Put in other terms, Brazil is losing about 2 football fields of forest per minute).

Brazilian

President Jair Bolsonaro, who took office last January, is a staunch supporter

of agribusiness, mining, and timber development in the Amazon. Government enforcement activities against

companies operating in the Amazon have dropped by 20% under his administration. He fired the head of the INPE in August for

expressing concern about the rise in deforestation.

The Amazon is

one of the largest natural sinks for carbon on the planet, and over the past 20

years, its capacity for taking carbon out of the atmosphere has been steadily

dropping. Brazil had promised under the

Paris Agreement to limit annual deforestation to 1,500 square miles by

2020. It does not appear that it will

meet that goal.