The federal government has already received from Inpe (National Institute for Special Research) the annual data on deforestation in the Amazon, consolidated by the Prodes system (Project of Deforestation Monitoring in the Amazon by Satellite). However, the result should not be disclosed while the country participates in COP27, the UN Climate Conference, which runs until the 18th, in Egypt.
THE Sheet found that the MCTI (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) plans to release data on deforestation at the end of the month, starting on the 28th, until December 2nd at the latest.
It is not the first time that the government of Jair Bolsonaro has avoided disclosing deforestation data at a climate COP – a tradition that had been maintained since 2005 by Brazilian governments.
In 2021, the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, argued throughout COP26 (held in Scotland) that deforestation in the Amazon was on a downward trend, using data from the last few months of Deter (Deforestation Detection System in Real Time).
Although the annual data from Prodes had been available since October 27 of that year, the government withheld the disclosure of the number. The result was only revealed after a note from SindCT (a union of federal civil servants in the aerospace sector) stated that the information had been available for almost a month.
The Deter system, which issues daily deforestation alerts in the biome, already indicates records every month throughout the year, indicating another possible increase in Prodes compared to the previous year, says forest engineer and Mapbiomas coordinator, Tasso Azevedo.
It is not possible, however, to make a direct comparison between the data of the systems, since there is constant improvement of Deter, changing the relationship with the results of Prodes, according to Azevedo. “But the fact that it is not published now is a sign that a bad number is coming”, he evaluates.
If the increase is confirmed, it will be the first time since the beginning of measurements (in 1988) that there have been four consecutive increases in the rate of deforestation in the Amazon. The result should also consolidate the jump in level compared to the average maintained before the Bolsonaro government.
Deforestation jumped from an average of 7,000 km² —maintained between 2015 and 2018, in a simple average of data from the Prodes system, produced by Inpe— to more than 10,000 km² in 2019, rising again to 10,900 km² in 2020 and to 13.2 thousand km² in 2021.
According to the secretary of the Amazon and environmental services of the Ministry of the Environment, Marcelo Freire, the ministry has no interference with the data or its dissemination. Sought by email, the MCTI did not respond to the report.
The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations
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