Every hour, Brazil lost 189 hectares of native vegetation throughout 2021 — 4,536 hectares per day. The accelerated march added up to 16,557 square kilometers of deforestation in the last year. The value is 20% higher than in 2020.
In the Amazon alone, the rate of deforestation was 1.9 hectares per minute, which is equivalent to about 18 trees per second. Across the country, there were about 191 new deforestation events per day. For each deforestation action, the average speed was 0.18 hectare/day in 2021 — against 0.16 hectare/day in 2020.
The data make up the Annual Deforestation Report (RAD), released this Monday (18) by the MapBiomas project, which maps changes in Brazilian territory based on the collaboration of universities, NGOs and technology companies.
This year, the report began to identify the main drivers of deforestation, based on the analysis of satellite images. Between 2019 and 2021, agricultural activity accounted for 97.8% of the deforested area in the country. The rest of the territories suffered deforestation due to mining, mining and urban expansion, among others.
About 77% of the deforested area in the country in 2021 overlaps with rural properties registered in the CAR (Rural Environmental Registry). “This means that in at least three quarters of deforestation it is possible to find a person responsible”, says the report.
Despite the gigantic sum of deforested areas, actions are concentrated in a few actors. Deforestation in properties registered in the CAR occurred in only 0.9% of properties in the last year. Between 2019 and 2021, only 2% of rural properties had deforestation.
“Deforestation in Brazil is a phenomenon made by a few to the detriment of many”, says forest engineer Tasso Azevedo, coordinator of Mapbiomas.
When declaring the perimeter of the property for CAR registration, the rural owner also decides and informs which portion of the land will be conserved as a Legal Reserve. These areas concentrate 22% of the total deforested area in the country.
“The impact goes to everyone. It deforests, reduces rainfall, increases the cost of energy, raises the temperature, damages all rural production, generates fire, harms people’s health”, he continues.
Only 1% of deforestation actions are legal, according to Mapbiomas, which crosses deforestation alerts monitored by satellite with deforestation authorizations, inspection notices and embargo issued by federal and state control agencies.
“The embargoes and assessments made by Ibama and ICMBio until May 2022 reached only 2.4% of deforestation and 10.5% of the deforested area identified between 2019 and 2021”, says the report.
The index is highest in the 52 municipalities defined as priorities by the government for combating deforestation. In them, the assessments responded to 4.4% of the alerts, which corresponds to 21% of the deforested area.
“The federal level has acted to avoid the assessments. The choice is to protect the 2% that deforest, impacting the entire rest of the Brazilian population”, says Azevedo, who was director of the Brazilian Forest Service.
State inspection has higher rates. At the top of the ranking, Espírito Santo responded to 86% of deforestation alerts — with authorizations, assessments or embargoes. Behind him are Mato Grosso (66%), Minas Gerais (43%) and Tocantins (41%). The lowest rates are in Bahia (1.7%), Santa Catarina (3%) and Pernambuco (4.4%).
The RAD presents data on deforestation in biomes from all regions of the country. The Amazon concentrates the largest front of deforestation, representing 59% of the total deforested in Brazil in 2021, followed by the cerrado (30%), caatinga (7%), Atlantic forest (1.8%), Pantanal (1.7%) and pampa (0.1%).
In the cerrado, 73% of deforestation was concentrated in the region of agricultural expansion known as Matopiba (between the borders of the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia).
In the Amazon, a new frontier of deforestation accounts for 12% of the country’s deforestation. Nicknamed Amacro, it is located between Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia and suffered a 28.8% jump in deforestation in 2021, compared to 2020.
“Amazonas has always been a well-preserved state, but it was the 1st in deforestation in some months of this year”, says Azevedo.
Pressured by the BR-319 paving project, illegal mining and the invasion of public lands, the state of Amazonas had a 50% jump in deforestation between 2020 and 2021, going from 4th to 2nd place in the ranking of states that most deforested in the last year, second only to Pará — which concentrated 24% of the entire country’s deforestation.
In 3rd place was Mato Grosso, which accounted for 11.5% of the country’s deforestation, followed by Maranhão (10%) and Bahia (9%). Together, the five states account for 67% of the deforested area in Brazil in the last year.
Between 2019 and 2021, indigenous lands were the only land category that did not experience an increase in deforestation. The most expressive increases in deforestation were in areas of empty land (88%), public areas not destined (47%) and private areas (32%).
The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations
