Buenos Aires
Brazil’s Amazon will experience its worst level of deforestation in 15 years in 2022, losing the equivalent of nearly 3,000 football fields a day, a report found.
A report released Wednesday by Brazilian nonprofit research institute Imazone, which promotes the protection and sustainable development of the Amazon, found that the region had recorded five consecutive loggings.
According to the report, deforestation from January to December 2022 will reach 10,573 square kilometers (4,082 square miles), and overall deforestation from 2019 to 2022 will reach 35,193 km² (13,588 square miles). bottom.
Imazone researcher Bianca Santos said she hopes the administration of President Luis Inacio Lula da Silva will make protecting the Amazon a priority.
As deforestation continues, Santos said there are effective measures to combat ecosystem degradation, including “indigenous land demarcation, restructuring of inspection agencies, and incentives to generate income from existing forests.” emphasized the need for action.
According to Imazon coordinator Carlos Souza Jr., in the last months of former president Jair Bolsonaro’s administration, “there was an uncontrolled competition in deforestation, but the gates were cattle, land speculation, illegal mining, and indigenous land. It was open to deforestation in and conservation units, which shows the magnitude of the challenge for the new government.”
Environmentalists and advocates of indigenous peoples and their territorial rights have criticized Bolsonaro’s environmental policies, arguing that he is curtailing environmental protection and causing environmental destruction.
At the United Nations Climate Change Conference COP27 in Egypt in October, Lula vowed to overturn Bolsonaro’s environmental policies, stressing that “without a protected Amazon there can be no global climate security.”
He also promised to protect the region’s biomass, strengthen inspection agencies and monitoring systems, and crack down on environmental crime.
In early January, Lula delivered on his election promises, creating a Ministry of Indigenous Peoples and appointing two new ministers to defend the country’s environmental policy and overthrow Bolsonaro’s policy. Marina Silva, an advocate for the Amazon rainforest, is once again Brazil’s environment minister, Sonia Guajajara. , as the nation’s first ever Minister for Indigenous Peoples, Indigenous Peoples themselves
Experts warn that Lula faces a difficult task of overturning Bolsonaro’s environmental policies.
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