In the first three years of his tenure, 34,000 square kilometers of tropical forest were cleared.
On the eve of the second round of the presidential elections in Brazil, which will take place this Sunday, October 30, between former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva and current President Jair Bolsonaro, one of the most relevant issues in the electoral campaign was the Amazon and its protection .
The South American giant is home to most of the Amazon rainforest, which is considered the “lungs of the planet” for its ability to absorb carbon dioxide and scientists say is vital to halting climate change, which has caused record levels of destruction since Bolsonaro came to power suffered in 2018.
In the first three years of his tenure, 34,000 square kilometers of tropical forest were cleared, an area larger than that of a country like Belgium, reports RTVE. “It is the worst government for the environment in the entire democracy of Brazil,” said Romulo Batista, spokesman for Greenpeace Brazil from the state of Manaus.
However, what worries environmentalists and scientists most is the uptick in deforestation. Since 2004, when Lula da Silva came to power, deforestation has declined and has been reduced by nearly 80% during his tenure, according to data from the Project for the Monitoring of Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite (PRODES, z its acronym in Portuguese) , which monitors this phenomenon and is quoted by the media.
In 2019, after the first year of the Bolsonaro government, average annual deforestation in the Amazon reached 13,038 square kilometers and increased by 73% through 2021.
By September of this year, the destruction of the Amazon hit a new record with the loss of 9,069 square kilometers of vegetation, the worst in 15 years, according to the Institute of Man and the Environment of the Amazon (IMAZON). For a decade, from 2008 to 2017, cumulative deforestation remained below 3,500 square kilometers.
Obligation, legislation and control
According to media reports, the government’s lack of interest in enforcing environmental laws and maintaining control over ranchers and farmers, who are primarily responsible for deforestation, is the main cause of the destruction of the Amazon.
“We’ve seen constant cuts in funding for the environmental agencies, which are responsible for monitoring and fighting illegal logging and fires,” Batista said.
According to the Climate Observatory, a group of several Brazilian NGOs, more than half of the budget of the federal environmental agency Ibama was not implemented last year. On the contrary, laws were pushed that “further accelerated the destruction of the environment”.
Though the Amazon in the Latin American country is protected by the forest law that requires landowners to conserve a certain percentage of their plots for virgin forest, environmental activists question the president’s lack of interest in enforcing it, given his strong ties to the logging, ranching and mining industries , who will help him come to power.
“Most of the participants in the Bolsonaro campaign come from the agricultural industry,” explains the Greenpeace spokesman.
At last year’s United Nations climate change conference (COP26) in Glasgow, Scotland, the President pledged to step up his fight against deforestation and eliminate it completely by 2028. However, the measures fail to convince activists like Batista, who insists that “the policy hasn’t changed at all.”
Likewise, the fires in the Amazon in 2022 have already surpassed all of last year. As of September 26, the National Institute for Space Research (INPE, for its acronym in Portuguese) documented 36,850 hot spots, with one particularly fateful day, September 7, dubbed “Fire Day,” on which they recorded more than 3,000 eruptions in the same time.
(With information from RT in Spanish)