Deforestation data, ready for weeks, should only be released this Wednesday (30)

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Data from the Prodes system (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Amazon by Satellite), which reveal annual deforestation in the Amazon forest, should only be published this Wednesday (30) by the federal government.

The promised date appears in a response from the MCTI (Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation) to a request for an Access to Information Law made by the Climate Observatory, a network that brings together dozens of socio-environmental organizations.

THE Sheet found out that the folder has already received data from Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), which has been managing Prodes for weeks, since the first half of November. The ministry, however, decided to disclose them only after COP27, the UN climate conference, which ended last Sunday (20).

Until then, however, the folder had not said the exact date for the publication of the annual number of deforestation in the Amazon.

According to the ministry, the disclosure this Wednesday is foreseen in a timetable suggested by the sector of Inpe responsible for PAMZ+, a monitoring program that includes Prodes. Although the survey on the Amazon comes out on the 30th, information on deforestation in the cerrado will only be known on December 14th.

The request, says the text, was evaluated by the direction of Inpe and forwarded to the minister, Paulo Alvim, who did not object to the calendar.

“Therefore, the disclosure of Prodes Amazônia for the period from August 1, 2021 to July 31, 2022 will be carried out on November 30, 2022. In relation to Prodes Cerrado, the disclosure will be carried out on December 14, 2022”, states the folder.

This was not the first time that the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) has postponed the release of deforestation data at a climate COP – breaking a tradition that had been maintained since 2005 by Brazilian governments.

In 2021, the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, defended during the COP26 (held in Scotland) that deforestation in the Amazon was trending downwards, using data from the last few months of Deter (System for the Detection of Deforestation in Real Time).

Although the annual data from Prodes had been available since October 27 of that year, the government only revealed the result after a note from SindCT (union of federal civil servants in the aerospace sector) stated that the information had already been available for almost a month. .

In recent years, deforestation has gone from an average of 7,000 km² —maintained between 2015 and 2018, based on a simple average of data from the Prodes system— to more than 10,000 km² in 2019, rising again to 10,900 km² in 2020 and to 13.2 thousand km² in 2021.

If an increase is confirmed again in the Bolsonaro administration, it will be the first time since the beginning of measurements (in 1988) that there have been four consecutive jumps in the rate of deforestation in the Amazon.

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

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