Brazil concentrates almost half of the deforested areas in the world in 2021.
In all, the country lost approximately 1.5 million hectares of native biome in the analyzed period.
The data are from the Global Forest Watch (GFW) platform, an initiative of the World Resources Institute (WRI), an organization linked to environmental issues, based in the United States.
The survey, released this Thursday (28), was produced from geospatial analyzes developed by the University of Maryland, in the United States, which monitors forest cover globally.
In second place in the world ranking, with a deforestation three times less than that of Brazil, appears the Democratic Republic of Congo, with the loss of 500 thousand hectares in 2021.
In Brazil, the main causes of deforestation are associated with agricultural expansion – which increased by 9% in 2021 when compared to the previous year, according to the analysis.
Despite not representing a large portion of forest loss, fires also appear as a reason for the degradation of the Brazilian biome.
For the director of Forests, Agriculture and Land Use at WRI, Fabíola Zerbini, the Brazilian scenario is “worrying”.
According to her, the country’s fauna is getting closer and closer to an inflection point, at which point the forest and the climate of the place will have changed so radically that it is no longer reversible.
“The loss of primary forest in Brazil is of particular concern, as new evidence reveals that the Amazon rainforest is losing resilience, being closer to a tipping point than previously thought,” says Zerbini.
Brazil currently owns about a third of the world’s remaining tropical forests and has maintained primary forest loss rates above 1 million hectares since 2016, according to GFW data.
Finally, the organization’s ranking also highlights South American countries such as Bolivia, Peru and Colombia, which together lost approximately 600,000 hectares of native forest in 2021.
THE CNNFabíola Zerbini, explained that the high numbers, as in Brazil, are related to the high leveling of the Amazon forest, which extends across eight nations.
“We can say that the high rates of South American countries are related to deforestation in the Amazon, with each place having its own peculiarities. In Peru, for example, the devastation is done for the plantation of Cocoa and other spices. But we can say that extraction for livestock is a common denominator. And the reason for this deforestation is a combination of lack of inspection and illegality in these places”, concluded the researcher.
THE CNN contacted the Ministry of the Environment to inquire about the research and awaits a response.
Source: CNN Brasil
