Deforestation: Amazon had area four times the size of Belém under alert in last five months of 2022

Iury Lima – from Amazon Agency

VILHENA (RO) – The deforestation of the Amazon closed 2022 with a new negative record. In the last five months of the year alone, 4,793 square kilometers entered the list of areas under alert, equivalent to four times the size of Belém, capital of Pará.

Therefore, the increase is 54% compared to the same period in 2021, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), released this January. 

The data are still partial and do not include the last day of December last year, due to cloud cover, which makes monitoring by satellite images difficult.

In this period, the Inpe Deter system issued more than 22 thousand alerts of areas under deforestation risk. Pará, Mato Grosso and Amazonas lead the way, with more than 3 thousand square kilometers, together.

August was the most devastating month in this period: 1,661 square kilometers felled. The trend slowed down as from September and in December there were a little more than 218 square kilometers under alert. 

The municipalities of Lábrea and Apuí, located in the south of Amazonas, destroyed the most forest between August and December 2022. This is because the cities are located along the BR-319 highway, which connects Manaus to Porto Velho. In the region, deforestation is influenced by the expectation of the construction work, which affects the largest block of native forests in the Legal Amazon. 

2023 could be even worse

Other institutions have also come up with alarming figures. The Institute of Man and Environment of the Amazon (Imazon) disclosed that the accumulated from January to November 2022 was greater than 10 thousand square kilometers: a loss of forest equivalent to 3 thousand soccer fields a day, since January 1st last year, sealing the worst mark in 15 years. 

Read also: Deforestation: Amazon lost 3 thousand soccer fields per day in 2022; accumulated loss repeats worst mark in 15 years

For 2023, Imazon estimates that the biome may lose almost 12 thousand square kilometers by December if deforestation continues at the current pace: almost 10 times the size of the city of Rio de Janeiro. 

The alert is made by PrevisIA, Imazon’s artificial intelligence, developed in partnership with Microsoft, which in 2022 got 80% of its predictions for the devastation of the Amazon Forest right. 

To arrive at this result, the researchers crossed data from Inpe’s Prodes project, which monitors devastation by satellite, with the records of Imazon’s Deforestation Alert System (SAD), between August 2021 and July 2022.

“It’s very robust data that allows us, mainly, to separate where the old [deforestation] frontiers are from the younger frontiers”, Imazon researcher Carlos Souza Jr. explains to CENARIUM MAGAZINE.

“So, forests near the younger frontiers will have a higher risk of deforestation than the forests near the old deforestation frontiers, which are already consolidated”, the researcher highlights. 

He points out that he would like to see the platform being used, this year, as a tool to control rampant deforestation in the Amazon. “I would also like to see agribusiness happening in areas that are free of deforestation. I would like to see the expansion of protected areas. New protected areas need to be created, especially in critical areas. The challenge will be big, considering that the PrevisIA points out a deforestation of 11,800 square kilometers (…) this is the size of the challenge for Minister Marina Silva”, he added.

What the Ministry of the Environment says

If the forecast comes true, the year will close with the second worst accumulated deforestation rate since 2008, second only to 2021, when 11,568 square kilometers were cut down, according to Inpe’s figures. January, for example, has already begun with 80% of the Protected Areas threatened. 

Pará, Amazonas and Mato Grosso concentrate 73% of the risk of deforestation at the current pace: more than 8 thousand square kilometers. An enormous challenge, imposed on the new Lula government and the Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, who is once again heading the portfolio. 

In a note to CENARIUM, Marina Silva points out that in the last four years “a complete disrespect for the Brazilian socio-environmental heritage” has become evident and recognizes the challenge of rebuilding the country’s environmental policy.

“Cattle were passed in the place where only environmental protection policies should pass. We have a huge challenge ahead of us. Deforestation, without a doubt, is one of the biggest. In this sense, the president issued, on his first day in office, extremely important acts for us to start actions to control deforestation”, said the minister.

She cites five regulations signed by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), such as Decree No. 11,367, which establishes the Permanent Interministerial Commission for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation and reestablishes the Action Plan for the Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon (PPCDAm), responsible for the drop of 80% of deforestation in the region, between 2004 and 2012, besides determining the control of deforestation, also, in the other Brazilian biomes.

Marina Silva also talks about the resumption of the Amazon Fund. “In order to release resources of around R$ 3.3 billion for inspection and control actions and environmental recovery and sustainable development projects in the Amazon”; the resumption of the operation and transparency of the National Environmental Fund; the suspension of delaying measures for the collection of environmental violations and the revocation of the Bolsonaro Government decree “which, by using the term ‘artisanal mining’, non-existent in the mineral legislation, actually encourages illegal mining in our country, especially in the Amazon.”

Rebuilding the forest

The social activist, indigenist, and administrative coordinator of the Association for the Ethnoenvironmental Defense Kanindé, Neidinha Suruí, assesses that one cannot rebuild, in just one year, what has been destroyed in Jair Bolsonaro’s mandate, since 2019. On the other hand, she says she is hopeful about the stance of the new federal government.

“Restructuring Funai, Ibama, and ICMBio will take time,” but they are very important acts, according to Neidinha. “Strengthening the Federal Police itself is fundamental to curb the invasions (…) it is fundamental for society to help the government to make changes. We, here, are willing to do this”, she told the report.

“The government’s own discourse, Lula’s discourse, Marina’s, Alckmin’s and all the ministers’ discourses leave me impressed. Because they are taking over with the discourse of the environment and human rights, so we see that it is different. But I reaffirm: the government will need help (…) the deforesters and the environmental criminals will not stay quiet”, warned Neidinha Suruí. 

Organized crime

President of the Brazilian Institute for Environmental Protection (Proam), Carlos Bocuhy, recalls that the Amazon “is an area mined by crime”. 

“You have 3 million square kilometers of clandestine roads, 1,600 to 1,700 illegal uncontrolled landing fields that serve mining, that serve unregulated deforestation, that is, you have a trend of criminality, of deforestation, that will be like braking a car at 120 per hour”, says the president of Proam in an interview with CENARIUM. 

The organized crime installed in the Amazon Forest is yet another challenge to the Lula government in its attempt to resume growth in the region. In 2020, the indigenous activist Ari Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau was murdered in Rondônia, for denouncing illegal logging in the territory of his people, which bears the same name as his ethnic group, where less than 200 people live.

Last year, the world turned to the biome with the deaths of Brazilian indigenist Bruno Araújo Pereira and British journalist Dominic Mark Phillips, aka Dom Phillips, who were shot dead by fishermen acting illegally in the Vale do Javari region.

“If you take all the measures, in an integrated action, with a monitoring system that involves command and control, that has financial resources, that has operational resources, that has Ibama, specialized police, at the end of the day, you will manage to reduce deforestation and achieve what the government intends, which would be to eradicate deforestation by 2030. But these measures are urgent. They need resources”, concluded Carlos Bocuhy. 

Read also: Bolsonaro government has monitored only 2% of deforestation alerts since the beginning of his mandate, MapBiomas shows