Amazon and cerrado have record deforestation in February – 03/10/2023 – Environment

Deforestation in the Amazon and in the cerrado jumped in February and broke the record for the month, according to data from Deter, a system from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) that gathers information to combat deforestation in almost real time.

Accumulated for the entire month of February, the area with alerts was 321.9 km² in the Amazon. The index represents a growth of 62% compared to last year (198.6 km²), which was, until then, the highest in the historical series started in 2015.

In the cerrado, the situation was even worse, with numbers that reached 557.8 km² and an increase of 97% compared to 2020, which had the previous record, of 282.8 km².

Adding the two biomes, the destroyed area reaches almost 880 km², more than half of the city of São Paulo (1,521 km²).

The beginning of the year is rainy both in the Amazon and in the Cerrado, which makes it difficult to clear vegetation and leads to lower numbers of vegetation loss, compared to other seasons. Thus, the high rates point to a gap in the fight against deforestation.

Socio-environmentalist Natalie Unterstell, president of the Talanoa Institute, focused on regulation and climate risks, points out that Deter is an early warning, but it is not closed data on deforestation (the official numbers are from another Inpe system, Prodes, and are released twice a year).

Even so, she considers that analyzes made by the organization point to a slowness in these almost 70 days of the new mandate of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), including the appointment of professionals to occupy important positions.

“Yes, there was a change in discourse and that is important, but the government is slowly structuring itself in terms of policy. We detected few actions in the sense of building or rebuilding public policies.”

She says, however, that positive measures have been found in the fight against illegal mining and, with the appointment of the new president of Ibama (Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), Rodrigo Agostinho, there are indications that great actions can take place inspection soon.

“That [índice do] Hold very high has to do with the government still not having entered the scene on the ground demonstrating strength. And it is when this happens that the deforesters at the front end will realize the real risk of carrying out these activities”, he says.

Deter maps and issues deforestation alerts with the aim of guiding actions by Ibama and other inspection bodies. Information is collected by satellite and the system only detects changes in forest cover greater than 25 hectares. Due to cloud cover —greater in rainy seasons—, not all deforestation scars are identified.

Due to the way it is prepared and predicting this type of variation, Deter data is used to analyze trends, which are consolidated every three months. That is, the numbers that will give a more solid diagnosis about the beginning of this year should only come out at the end of the first quarter.

The February records come after records of declines in the two biomes in the previous month: in the Amazon by 61% and in the Cerrado by 10%.

Part of this result, however, can be attributed to the amount of clouds, which has the potential to have disturbed the registration of deforested areas. Coverage in January was 33% in the Amazon rainforest and dropped to 20% in February. In the cerrado, the rate went from 39% to 29%.

Rômulo Batista, Amazon spokesman for Greenpeace Brazil, says that the scenario is complex and that analyzing only the percentage of cloud cover may not result in an objective answer.

“If, for example, in January the areas on the frontier of destruction were more covered, you don’t have the detection capacity, because the satellites don’t see through the cloud. And, if in February you had a window in which you had less coverage in these areas, we can see this increase.”

The most deforested states in the Amazon were Mato Grosso (161.8 km²), responsible for half of the devastated area in the biome, Pará (46.4 km²) and Amazonas (46.3 km²), followed by Roraima (31.1 km²) , where most of the Yanomami Indigenous Land is located.

Bahia (268.2 km²), Tocantins (67.5 km²), Piauí (63.2 km²), and Maranhão (51.6 km²) had the worst numbers in the cerrado. The region, known as Matopiba, is the main deforestation frontier in the biome.

Yuri Salmona, executive director of the Cerrados Institute, points out that deforestation needs to be analyzed as a trend line, which was a sharp increase in the cerrado over the last four years. “There is a whole institutional environment and an economic context that favor the maintenance of the growth trend and dismantling that takes some time”, he says.

“Today, almost 50% of the cerrado is deforested, an area almost the size of Chile. Of this total, more than 90% is used for agriculture and livestock”, he explains, adding that the vegetation is mainly removed to make way for pasture, to production of meat and milk, and for soy.

Salmona also points out that the concentration of destruction in the Matopiba area happens precisely because it is in this region that the largest preserved portion of the biome exists, while in the rest of the country most of the cerrado has already been deforested. It is also home to many endemic species and formations of ecosystems and habitats that do not exist elsewhere.

The Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, Ibama and the Ministry of Justice and Public Security were sought to provide clarification on actions being taken to control deforestation, but did not respond until the publication of this report.

On the 27th, when she met with the US government’s special envoy for the climate, John Kerry, Minister Marina Silva spoke of the preview of the Deter data for February, which already pointed to a record in deforestation. She stated that there is a “criminal action” at work and that the government would be preparing “to confront”.

“They are deforesting even in the rainy season. It is a kind of revenge for the actions that are already being taken at the end. And we will continue working, this is our objective. We are not like the previous government, the data are transparent”, stated the minister.

_{The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.}