More than a thousand trees are deforested per minute in the Legal Amazon in 2021, according to the Plena Mata panel, a forest monitor that uses data from MapBiomas, based on the average daily deforestation detected by DETER/INPE.
The panel, which counts in real time the trees felled by human action, points out that more than 474.8 million trees have already been deforested in the country this year alone. This corresponds to deforestation of more than 792,000 hectares. Every day, on average, more than 1.5 million trees are destroyed. And the daily loss is 2,697 hectares of forest.
The month of October, this year, had the largest amount of deforested area in the Legal Amazon, compared to the same period since 2017. 109,083 hectares were deforested. In the accumulated result for the year, 2021 has already surpassed last year’s deforestation, but it is still a little lower compared to 2019. In comparison with 2018 and 2017, the present year has already accounted for at least twice the amount of deforestation in the Amazon Legal registered in the other years mentioned.
The Legal Amazon is a territory comprising nine Brazilian states (Acre, Amazonas, Amapá, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins). In view of the high rates of deforestation, the Legal Amazon Consortium signed last Saturday (6) a memorandum of understanding with an international consortium aimed at reducing carbon and the consequent protection of forests.
The coalition’s goal is to stop deforestation by financially helping to protect tropical forests on a large scale.
Recently, researchers from the Oswaldo Cruz Foundation (Fiocruz), the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) and the University of São Paulo (USP) published a study pointing out that large-scale deforestation in the Amazon, added to global warming, may raise temperatures in the region by up to 11.5°C and put life, nature and the economy at extreme risk.
Fearing an erosion of the country’s environmental image abroad, the federal government announced at the beginning of the month that it intends to bring forward to 2027 or 2028 the current goal of eliminating illegal deforestation in the country.
Currently, the proposal is to reach the goal by 2030. However, in order to actually anticipate this goal, it is necessary to substantially advance in the fight against deforestation, which continues to advance rapidly and continuously in the country.
Reference: CNN Brasil
