Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon increased by 15 per cent during the past 12 months, according to the National Institute for Space Research.

From July 2010 to July 2011 the vast South American rainforest lost 2,654 square kilometres of vegetation in the states of Mato Grosso and Para, according to a preliminary analysis of satellite photos.

The year before, 2,295 square kilometres were destroyed over that time period.

This July, 225 square kilometres were lost to deforestation, though this was significantly less than the 485 square kilometres destroyed in July 2010.

In April 477 square kilometres were destroyed, with more than 95 per cent of the devastation taking place in Mato Grosso, which is a major agricultural frontier used for cattle ranches and soybean farming.

The latest figures were calculated from a satellite system known as DETER, which detects in real time when an area larger than 61 acres is destroyed, though its results are not always exact due to cloud cover.

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.

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.

The rate of deforestation has declined since then, in part because of DETER, and at the 2009 UN climate change summit in Copenhagen, Brazil committed itself to reducing Amazon deforestation by 80 per cent by 2020.