Brazil has revealed the rate of deforestation in the Amazon has increased by a dramatic 28 per cent over the past year, after years of decline.
Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said the government is working to reverse this “crime” which is based on figures taken between August 2012 and July this year.
Activists have blamed the increase in destruction on a controversial reform to Brazil’s forest protection law.
Last year Brazil reported the lowest rate of deforestation in the Amazon since monitoring began.
The provisional statistics from August 2012 to last July suggest that the area suffering deforestation was 5843 square kilometres, compared to 4,571sq/km in the previous 12 months.
Despite the interruption of the decline sequence started in 2009, the latest deforested area still remains the second lowest ever recorded.
The result frustrated the government’s expectations, but several scientific institutions had suggested increases in their monthly deforestation reports
Environmentalists say the controversial reform of the forest protection law in 2012 is to blame for the upwards trend.
The changes reduced protected areas in farms and declared an amnesty for areas destroyed before 2008.
President Dilma Rousseff passed the reform, a long-standing demand of the country’s farmers’ lobby, known as the ruralists, after several vetoes.
Agriculture accounts for more than five per cent of the Brazilian GDP.
“If you sleep with the ruralist lobby, you wake up with deforestation,” Amazon expert Paulo Adario from Greenpeace wrote on Twitter.
Ms Teixeira said the destruction rate was “unacceptable” but denied President Rousseff’s administration were to blame.
“This swing is not related to any federal government fund cuts for law enforcement,” she told reporters, adding that around 4000 criminal actions have been taken against deforesters in the past year.
As soon as she returns from Poland, where she is representing Brazil at the United Nations summit on climate change, Ms Teixeira said she would set up a meeting with local governors and mayors of the worst hit areas to discuss strategies to revert the trend.
The majority of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions, believed to be one of the main causes of global warming, stem from deforestation.
The Brazilian government made a commitment in 2009 to reduce deforestation in the Amazon by 80 per cent by the year 2020, in relation to the average between 1996 and 2005.
3 Responses
In terms of a practical understanding of nature, compared to the bees we are but infants.
When the ‘counter-culture’ movement was in full
swing in the United States in the late 1960s, many younger people began a ‘back to the earth’ movement in an
attempt to draw a closer connection the land that they instinctively knew
sustained them. I am working on the closed cycle gardening and will plant our vegetable garden in the area that has been
alfalfa and mulch with the alfalfa but since we have animals I will run it
though them first and use it as manure.