Deforestation: cerrado has an increase before critical season – 05/12/2023 – Environment

The cerrado lost 782 km² of vegetation in April this year. In the accumulated since January, the number goes to 2,206 km², approximate area of ​​Palmas, capital of Tocantins, according to data released this Friday (12) by Deter. The increase in deforestation in the most biodiverse savannah in the world had already been pointed out in partial data from the Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) system used for real-time inspection.

In the Amazon, there was a drop compared to April last year, with 329 km² cut down in the forest. The number remains the third lowest mark of alerts for the month since the beginning of the historical series in 2015.

Experts interviewed by the report claim that the cerrado suffers from public land without allocation, has less conserved areas than the Amazon and could be affected by regulations from the European Union that focus on the tropical forest.

Also, the interaction of the cerrado with the Amazon plays a fundamental role in the rainfall regime and supply of water bodies in the country. Legal reserves in the biome vary between 20% and 32%, almost the opposite of those in the Amazon, with 80% protected by law on rural properties.

The coming months will be a challenge for combating deforestation, facilitated by dry weather and lack of rain —not by chance, the peaks of the Deter historical series, which started in 2019 in the cerrado, are in this period.

The system maps and issues deforestation alerts to guide actions by Ibama and other inspection bodies. The results represent an indication, but they are not the closed data on deforestation, which is published by Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), also from Inpe, twice a year.

Deter’s main alert, for specialists, is the urgency in the region, which must be analyzed together with the neighboring biome. “There is a historical, and justified, emphasis on the Amazon, but there is a very strong connection between what happens in the forest and in the cerrado”, says Paulo Moutinho, senior researcher at Ipam (Amazon Environmental Research Institute).

One is regulatory. “The cerrado only has 7% of its area legally protected. In the Amazon, the set of conservation units, extractive reserves and indigenous lands, among others, reaches 50%.”

“Still, there is no allocation for 2.5 million hectares of public lands, which have been being illegally confiscated at a very high rate”, highlights Moutinho.

According to data from the Ministry of the Environment and Climate Change, fines for deforestation grew 287% from January to April this year, compared to the same period last year. The increase in the cerrado, added to other biomes, was 169%.

The government expects to start updating the Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Cerrado in July. Its counterpart for the Amazon, the so-called PPCDAm, is in the process of analyzing the contributions received in public consultation.

Yuri Salmona, executive director of the Cerrados Institute, draws attention to another factor that drives deforestation in the cerrado: international legislation itself, such as that approved by the European parliament, leads to a migration of deforestation in the region.

This is because there are restrictions on the purchase of products that originate in deforested areas or that do not follow production chain control rules. The cerrado, however, was left out of European Union legislation. And the phenomenon is not exclusive to Brazil.

“There are other savannahs in the world that suffer from blocs like the European Union”, he explains.

For Salmona, the ideal would be for deforestation in the cerrado to be nothing more than a ceiling, and for agricultural production to be balanced with the preservation of vegetation.

“We have more than 30 million hectares of underutilized pastures, sometimes with a head of cattle per hectare. Why deforest if we continue with poor management and low technology?”, he says.

The region of intense agricultural activity known as Matopiba (name formed by the acronyms of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia) led the expansion of deforestation in the cerrado in 2022, and is already showing effects on production.

“The withdrawal of the cerrado, combined with an effect of global climate change, has already caused a loss of 30% in soybean productivity, because the climatic optimum has been geographically displaced”, says Moutinho.

The climatic optimum is the temperature range favorable to soybeans, which varies between 20°C and 30°C, with the ideal temperature around 25°C.

Another problem is the reduction in the flow of rivers in the Cerrado. A study by the Cerrados Institute, in partnership with the Society, Population and Nature Institute, points out that 88% of 81 watersheds in the biome have already experienced a reduction in flow caused by deforestation between 1985 and 2022.

The projection indicates that the cerrado may lose 34% of the flow in its basins over the next 28 years. In 2050, this reduction should reach 23,600 cubic meters of water per second, equivalent to eight times the volume of water flowing through the Nile River.

Deforestation, according to the survey, is the main factor responsible for this reduction. “This model of occupation of the cerrado for agricultural commodities, exports and large estates depends on the excessive exploitation of resources, it’s like shooting yourself in the foot. Agriculture itself ends agriculture”, says Salmona.

Still, says the researcher, several rivers that feed basins in the Amazon originate in the cerrado region, such as the Tocantins and Xingu. This water, together with evapotranspiration from the forest, helps to form flying rivers, corridors of humidity that will bring rain to other parts of the country. In addition, the cerrado guards 8 of the 12 largest basins in the country.

“From the hydrological point of view and from others, it is necessary to talk about the Cerrado-Amazon binomial. They are like the legs of a body”, he summarizes.

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