Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon on the rise again

Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon accelerated in June, with more than 300 square kilometres destroyed, a 17 per cent increase over the previous month, according to government researchers.

The National Institute for Space Research said 312.6 square kilometres were destroyed in June, based on the preliminary analysis of satellite photos of the vast South American rainforest.

May had seen a decrease in deforestation to 268 square kilometres, from 477 square kilometres in April.

In April, more than 400 square kilometres of forests were destroyed in a single state, Mato Grosso, which is seen as a major agricultural frontier and is used for cattle ranches and soybean farming.

At the 2009 UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, Brazil committed itself to reducing Amazon deforestation by 80 per cent by 2020.

Brazil, the world’s fifth largest country by area, has 5.3 million square kilometres of jungle and forests – mostly in the Amazon river basin – of which only 1.7 million are under state protection.

The rest is in private hands, or its ownership is undefined.

Massive deforestation has made Brazil one of the world’s top greenhouse gas emitters, and the pace of deforestation peaked in 2004 at 27,000 square kilometres a year.

But by 2010 it had dropped to 6,500 square kilometres, thanks in part to the INPE’s Real-Time Deforestation Detection System, which allows researchers to collect new satellite images on a daily basis. However, the system can only monitor areas of 25 hectares or more, so its results are not considered definitive.

The Amazon River Basin is home to the largest rainforest on earth. The basin – roughly the size of the 48 contiguous United States – covers some 40 per cent of the South American continent and includes parts of eight South American countries: Brazil, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador, Colombia, Venezuela, Guyana, and Suriname, as well as French Guiana, a department of France.