Deforestation by clear cut in the Legal Amazon was 13,235 km2 between August 2020 and July 2021, according to the estimate published this Thursday (18) by Prodes, a satellite monitoring project for deforestation in the Legal Amazon, by Inpe (Institute National Space Research).
The growth compared to the previous period was 21.97%, when deforestation in the region had reached 10,851 km2. This year, the state of Pará led the ranking of deforested areas in the period, with 5,257 km2, followed by Amazonas (2,347 km2), Mato Grosso (2,263 km2) and Rondônia (1,681 km2).
Unlike what happened in previous years, the federal government did not create an agenda for the announcement of the data, which were published on the Inpe website, without any dissemination action.
Last Wednesday (17), a note from SindCT, the union of federal civil servants in the aerospace sector, denounced the imposition of secrecy by Inpe’s management on the result of the annual estimate by Prodes. According to the note, Inpe’s technical team had submitted the report to the government in mid-October, but secrecy prevented the process from being followed up by civil servants.
The signing of the document released by the government on Thursday (18) informs the date of October 27th. On the last 10th, in a speech at COP26, the UN climate change conference, minister Joaquim Leite (Environment), chose to quote data from the monthly bulletin of Deter/Inpe from July to September.
“The government lied at the COP. It used data that showed a slight drop to announce that the government was in control and hid the data from Prodes, which since 2005 has been presented before or during the COPs”, said João Paulo Capobianco, former executive secretary of the Ministry of the Environment and vice president of the Democracy and Sustainability Institute.
The behavior of current deforestation rates is similar to periods prior to public policies to control deforestation, such as the PPCDAm (Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, created in 2004), which led to the historical minimum deforestation scenario of 4,600 km2 in 2012.
Since then, deforestation in the region has fluctuated between 6,200 km2 and 7,900 km2 until, from 2018 to 2019, it increased by 29%, rising to a new level of around 10 thousand km2. In 2020, it rose to 10,900 km2 and now, with the new increase of almost 22%, it reaches 13,235 km2, similar to the 2006 scenario, when the deforested area in the Amazon reached 14,300 km2.
In percentage values, however, the galloping growth of deforestation has not been observed since the 1990s – when, from 1997 to 1998, it rose by 24%.
“The result is the result of a persistent, planned and continuous effort to destroy the environmental protection policies of the Jair Bolsonaro regime. It is the triumph of a cruel project that makes the world’s largest tropical forest disappear before our eyes and makes Brazil de Bolsonaro a global climate threat”, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, in a statement. “It is the third consecutive increase in the Bolsonaro government and also the first time since the beginning of the measurements, in 1988, that the devastation rises for four years in a row”, states the text.
