The Amazon rainforest lost 218.41 km² of vegetation in December last year, the last under the management of former President Jair Bolsonaro (PL), in yet another record for his government. The data are from Deter, a system of Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), which issues alerts to combat deforestation in real time.
The record is Bolsonaro’s highest mark for the month of December, compared to the same previous periods. If considered the historical series, starting in 2015, it is the third, behind 2017, which recorded 287.51 km², and 2015, which had 266.29 km².
The numbers will still be updated by Inpe, since the information published this Friday (6) goes up to December 30 of last year.
In her inauguration speech, last Wednesday (4), the Minister of the Environment, Marina Silva, announced the creation of a special secretariat dedicated exclusively to controlling and combating deforestation.
It was in his first passage through the ministry, in the first term of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (PT), that the fight against deforestation, with the PPCDAm, reached an 83% reduction in the deforestation rate between 2004 and 2012.
Deforestation is monitored in two ways by Inpe. In addition to Deter, whose full name is the Deforestation Detection System in Real Time, which publishes monthly information, data from Prodes (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite) are released twice a year — the first is an estimate .
While Deter was created to enable faster inspection actions and the fight against environmental crimes, Prodes is data on deforestation itself, monitored by satellite and with more precision.
Despite this, Deter can help indicate trends of growth, decline or maintenance of deforestation in the Amazon.
Bolsonaro’s management also accumulated records at Prodes. For the fourth consecutive year, deforestation in the Amazon, in one year, exceeded 10,000 km². Program data, released in November last year, show that 11,568 km² of forest fell to the ground from August 2021 to July 2022.
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