Cerrado deforestation grows 15% in the quarter, almost 80% in private areas

Deforestation in the cerrado is advancing, moving towards native vegetation and is driven by large producers and private ownership. This is what data from the Cerrado Deforestation Alert System (SAD-Cerrado), launched this Monday (12), show.

According to the monitoring, carried out via satellite and with artificial intelligence, the area where alerts of devastation of the biome were recorded grew 15% in the last quarter: from 253.4 thousand hectares between May and July 2021, it increased to 291.2 thousand hectares. in the same period of 2022.

In the first half of the year, 472,800 hectares of deforestation alerts have already been identified — an area that remains at the same level as the previous year.

In addition, 70% of the total records are of pieces of land greater than ten hectares and 78.9% are located within private areas — which indicates that they are not the result of the effect of small rural producers or traditional communities.

“Not only has deforestation in the cerrado increased, but it has also moved to the North, in the so-called Matopiba region, where we still have good portions of intact cerrado that are being the subject of real estate speculation and the advancement of agribusiness”, says André Guimarães, director from Ipam (Amazon Environmental Research Institute).

Matopiba comprises the states of Maranhão, Tocantins, Piauí and Bahia, represents 30% of the cerrado and recorded 65% of deforestation in the biome this year, the data indicate.

as showed the Sheetduring the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL), the growth of deforestation threatens not only Matopiba, but also the region called Amacro (Amazonas, Acre and Rondônia), another area with a strong presence of native forest.

A MapBiomas report, released in July this year, indicates a 29% jump in deforestation at Amacro from 2020 to 2021. Last year, the region concentrated 12.2% of the total deforested in the country and 20.8% of what was cut down in the Amazon.

According to this same analysis, Matopiba concentrated 23.6% of the total deforested in the country in 2021 and 72.5% of what was lost in the cerrado. Compared to 2020, there was a 14% increase in deforestation in this region.

Under Bolsonaro, the Amazon has also been recording records of deforestation and fires, as has the Pantanal.

Throughout the country, in the first three years of government, there was an increase in the number of municipalities with deforestation alerts, according to Mapbiomas. There were 1,734 (31.1% of the total) in 2019 and jumped to 2,889 (51.9%) in 2021. In these three years, 61.2% of Brazilian municipalities had at least one deforestation detected.

Also more frequent, for example, were large deforestations — with more than 100 hectares (about 100 football fields). There was a 43.5% increase in the number of these alerts between 2019 and 2021. They represented 44.2% of the total deforested in the country in 2019, increased to 46.6% in 2020 and to 51.7% in 2021.

That is, data from SAD show that the cerrado follows the same trend identified by MapBiomas for Brazil, with the growth of large deforestation towards native areas.

“In the Cerrado, deforestation is happening mainly in the savannas, 70%, and mainly in the states of Maranhão and Tocantins, with a lot of difference to the rest, remembering that these are the states that have the most remaining native vegetation”, adds Juan Doblas, a researcher at the Ipam.

The native forest currently represents about 53% of the Cerrado —or 26% of the country’s native vegetation—, the most diverse biome in Brazil.

SAD Cerrado was created by Ipam in partnership with MapBiomas and the Image Processing and Geoprocessing Laboratory (Lapig) at the Federal University of Goiás.

Doblas emphasizes that the system works in a complementary and parallel way to the Prodes measurements (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), the program carried out by the federal government.

The difference is that, while most vegetation monitoring methods are done by human identification, SAD created an artificial intelligence capable of identifying areas of probable deforestation and generating alerts.

Furthermore, the computer is able to exclude natural fires and the loss of vegetation due to seasonal droughts from the account.

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