Preliminary official data seen on Friday shows deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest rose 14% in March from the previous year, highlighting the continued challenges for the new government.
Part of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s pledge when he took office on Jan. 1, was to end deforestation after years of surging deforestation under his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who slashed environmental protection efforts in the Amazon.
“This rise in numbers reveals that the Amazon still suffers from a huge lack of governance and that the new government needs to act urgently to rebuild its capacity for repression to environmental crime, which had been totally destroyed by the last government,” said Marcio Astrini, head of local environmental group Climate Observatory.
Satellite images from the INPE national space investigations institute showed 356 square kilometers of forest had been destroyed in March in the Brazilian Amazon.
The latest figures present does not show a firm impact of the government’s anti-deforestation moves thus far with the destruction for January to March falling to 845 square kilometers (326 square miles), a decrease of 11% from the prior year.
Those figures show the scale of the task facing leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, just 100 days into his return to power.
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“Even though the current government has shown its intention to seriously fight deforestation, it will take time to change the scenario,” said Mariana Napolitano, the conservation manager for the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF) in Brazil.
Brazil officially measures annual deforestation from August to July, to limit the influence of cloud cover obscuring destruction satellite images during the rainy months. For the first eight months of that period, August 2022 to March 2023, deforestation is up 39% year on year.
“There are only four months left to close the final deforestation numbers. This means that a decrease in deforestation in the Amazon final rates in 2023 is unlikely. In fact, it has greater chances of increasing,” Astrini says.
U.S. climate envoy John Kerry said that the world cannot meet its climate goal to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degree Celsius unless it protects the Amazon rainforest when he visited Brazil late in February.
Meanwhile, Washington announced at the beginning of the year it intended to contribute to Brazil’s Amazon Fund, which supports conservation projects in the jungle region while Norway has also pledged its support for Brazil’s efforts to attract additional donor countries for the Amazon Fund.
Story was adapted from Reuters.
