Here are some bad news I read last week : deforestation in Brazil is increasing again. For the past years, it had been decreasing steadily, reaching its lowest levels in two decades.
But over the last year, deforestation increased by 28 percent over the previous one. As the BBC noted : ” The government is working to reverse this “crime”, Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said.”
This takes place as on a global scale, the world has lost a staggering 900,000 square miles (2.3 million square kilometers) of forests between 2000 and 2102 to deforestation or fire.
As Grist reports on global deforestation :
A little more than 300,000 square miles of forest was established or replanted worldwide between 2000 and 2012. Unfortunately, almost 900,000 square miles was destroyed during the same time period — logged, ravaged by fire, or attacked by insects.
Those are the main conclusions of a study that examined hundreds of thousands of images snapped by the U.S. government’s Landsat satellites. Academic researchers partnered with Google staff to produce stunning maps displaying the world’s forests and areas that have been deforested or reforested since 2000.
Those maps were used to produce the following short videos:
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Back to Brazil, here are some extracts from the BBC article :
” Last year Brazil reported the lowest rate of deforestation in the Amazon since monitoring began. The provisional statistics from August 2012 to last July suggest that the area suffering deforestation was 5,843 sq km (2,255 sq miles), compared to 4,571 sq km (1,765 sq miles) in the previous 12 months.”
” The 28% rise interrupts a period of declining deforestation which began in 2009. However, it still remains the second lowest annual figure for forest loss in absolute terms.”