As someone fleeing the scales, the government of Jair Bolsonaro (PL) did not realize the “thinning” in deforestation in the Amazon, whose annual rate for 2022 is 11.2% lower than last year.
Published this Wednesday afternoon (30) with a discreet update on the Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) page, the result of the Prodes system estimates that deforestation in the Legal Amazon from August 2021 to July 2022 was 11,568 km² .
In 2021, Prodes pointed to a 21.9% jump in annual deforestation. The rate of 13,038 km² that year made the government hide the data during that edition of the UN Climate Conference, COP26. The number was only revealed after pressure from Inpe technicians.
This year, the government repeated the strategy of hiding the data during COP27, as the Sheet revealed, leading the transition team of the president-elect, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), to request the numbers from Prodes.
Also during COP27, which ended on the 19th after two weeks of negotiations in Egypt, rumors about the reduction in deforestation circulated in the corridors, from sources linked to the transitional government that participated in the conference. Even so, the Minister of the Environment, Joaquim Leite, refused to talk about the data. “I have no idea,” he told Sheetwhen asked at the end of the Prodes conference.
The scenario, as well as the minister’s response, suggest that the government has not even spied the result concluded by Inpe on November 3rd. Disinterest suggests that the government did not expect a positive result — after all, it did not work for it.
Elected on the promise of reducing the protection of the environment, the government of Jair Bolsonaro concludes its term marked internationally as an environmental pariah. He carried out, over the course of four years, a declaredly anti-environmental policy marked by “boiadas” (the deregulation of environmental norms), by the dismantling of inspection bodies, the stoppage of environmental fines and the persecution of civil servants and environmentalists.
The result of the four-year mandate delivers a deforestation 59.5% higher than the previous period – whose average, between 2015 and 2018, was 7,145 km² in the Legal Amazon. According to an analysis by the Climate Observatory, this is the highest increase over a presidential term since the beginning of the measurement.
The threshold says more than the percentage change. It is he who indicates the size of the strides in the race to devastate the biome.
More than promoting relief represented by percentage reductions, the elected government of Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva will need to promote a reversal of the new level of deforestation consolidated by the administration of Jair Bolsonaro.
The horizon to be aimed at by Lula deals with political frontiers and environmental limits.
The president-elect showed, in the electoral campaign and in his participation in COP27, that he understood the spirit of the new global geopolitics, engendered by the climate agenda, and that he will use the political key that the Amazon represents for Brazilian diplomacy.
For this reason, fulfilling the Brazilian goal in the Paris Agreement of zeroing deforestation by the end of the decade is a strategic objective for his mandate. It is also a necessity imposed by the limits of the biome, which needs to keep around 80% of the territory conserved to avoid a point of no return, from which the forest would no longer be able to regenerate.
In view of the political and environmental scenarios, the relief represented by the drop in deforestation in Prodes 2022 is quite limited. In addition to being unrepresentative in relation to the increase promoted throughout the Bolsonaro administration, the reduction in the rate does not represent the most current picture of deforestation in Amazon.
Prodes annual calculations cover the period from August of the previous year to July of the current year. Prodes 2022, therefore, starts with last year’s data and goes until the beginning of the dry season (more favorable to deforestation) in the Amazon.
During the months of August, September and October of this year, deforestation has broken records with significant increases in relation to the same months in recent years, according to the Deter deforestation alerts —the system, also from Inpe, uses different parameters and cannot be compared to Prodes, since its focus is to generate alerts to support inspection.
In August alone, Deter pointed to a deforestation of 1,661 km² this year, against 918 km² last year. The disparity was repeated in September and the month of October had the highest deforestation since the beginning of this measurement, in 2016.
The explosion of the last few months has been attributed to the electoral phenomenon: a kind of “bye, Bolsonaro” from the deforesters, who would be taking advantage of the final period of the mandate that he promised and fulfilled the amnesty to the activities of predatory and illegal exploration of the biome, since Lula and also the other presidential candidates promised, during the electoral campaign, to reverse the herd.
Deforestation data for the current semester will be computed by Prodes next year, at the end of which Lula should appear at COP28 to report to the world on the fight against deforestation in the Amazon.
The inheritance for Lula, therefore, will not be the relief in the 2022 data, but the destruction already accounted for 2023. Punishing the illegal loggers who are now saying goodbye to Bolsonaro is one of the main responses that will need to be given by the Lula government.
The strategy is no secret. It was at the heart of the policy that led to a 54.8% reduction in deforestation in the second Lula administration, between 2003 and 2006, and a further 43.9% drop in the first Dilma Rousseff administration, from 2007 to 2010.
Although he already knows the recipe and trusts the balance of science, Lula’s third government will have little time to restructure environmental inspections —which will define the resumption of the diet.
The Planeta em Transe project is supported by the Open Society Foundations.
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