Regardless of what happens to deforestation in December in the Amazon, the last year of the Jair Bolsonaro (PL) government will be the most destructive in the recent history of the biome.
Data from Deter, a program by Inpe (National Institute for Space Research) designed to help environmental inspection activities, point to more than 10,000 km² of forest cut down in 2022.
In this account, November contributed with 554.6 km², the second highest value for the month and a 122% increase in destruction compared to November last year (which had 249.49 km² of deforestation). The record for the month is 2019 (with 562.8 km² of cleared forest), the first year of the Bolsonaro government.
The Bolsonaro years dominate, by a wide margin, the ranking of forest clearing in Deter’s recent history, starting in August 2015 —the system started earlier, but from that year onwards there was an update of the sensors, which makes proper comparisons impossible .
After 2022 appears the first year under Bolsonaro, 2019, with more than 9.1 thousand km² of forest to the ground. Then, 2020, with more than 8,400 km².
The 2022 record is filled with monthly records. Of the eleven months of the year already fully computed, six had record deforestation for the months in question. And several of them took the record of other years of the Bolsonaro government.
In addition, five months saw more than 1,000 km² of forest cleared. To get an idea of ​​what this number means, it is possible to compare it to the size of the municipality of São Paulo, which is just over 1.5 km².
Virtually all of the monthly deforestation records in the Amazon are in the four years under Bolsonaro. The only exception —at least so far— is December, a month that usually has more timid deforestation rates. The record holder, in this case, is December 2017, under the Michel Temer (MDB) government, with about 287 km² of felling.
It is worth mentioning that the data considered in this report takes into account the period of a normal year, that is, from January to December. A few weeks ago, data from Prodes was released, another Inpe program that is specifically designed to measure deforestation. In the case of Prodes, however, the period of time considered begins in August of one year and extends to July of the following year.
According to the recently released Prodes, from August 2021 to July 2022, 11,568 km² of forest fell to the ground. It is the fourth consecutive year (remembering, from August of one year to July of another) in which the destruction exceeded 10,000 km². The last measurement, however, represented a drop of 11% compared to the rate of the previous period and interrupts a sequence of growth that had been going on since 2018.
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