Those Destroying Brazil's Amazon Hitting Their Stride Now; Bigger, Faster, More Mechanized Than Ever
From 2009 to 2018, Brazil recorded an annual deforestation rate of 6,493 square kilometers (2,507 square miles), on the back of policies aimed at slowing the destruction of the Amazon. Then, at the start of 2019, Jair Bolsonaro took office as president. Since then, the deforestation rate has surged, hitting 11,088 km2 (4,281 mi2) for the 12-month period ending July 31, 2020, according to data from INPE, the national space agency that has been monitoring Amazon deforestation for 60 years.
A new paper now shows that this increase in deforestation has been marked by larger individual areas of deforestation. “Imagine the annual deforestation rate as a cake which can be cut in a variety of ways depending on how hungry the guests are — or in this case, the loggers. Today, the cake is being cut into much larger chunks because the criminals are hungrier, driven by current environmental policies,” says Ralph Trancoso, a Brazilian forestry engineer at the University of Queensland in Australia and author of the paper published early April in the journal Environmental Research Letters.
Trancoso’s research shows that, based on INPE data, the average size of individual clear-cut patches in the forest has nearly doubled over the past five years, from 15 hectares to 24 hectares (37 acres to 60 acres). “The average size of deforested areas has increased 61% under the Bolsonaro administration as compared to the previous decade [2009-2018] when policies were, to a certain extent, implemented,” Trancoso says. “It so happens that deforestation today is mostly composed of patches larger than 100 hectares [250 acres], or to illustrate, enormous areas the size of over 90 football fields.”
Both the average size of deforested patches (gray line) and the annual deforestation rate (red bars) increased in 2019 and 2020, the first two years of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency. Image © Ralph Trancoso (2021).
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“The current interest is to cut down a lot of trees,” Trancoso says. “Before, deforesters knew they could be caught, but now their posture seems to have changed. They are no longer afraid of governmental monitoring or controls. On the contrary: they feel driven to take down more forest because they know they won’t be penalized.” He says Brazil has the expertise to control the destruction, starting by identifying the culprits. For instance, monitoring experts understand that small clearings along riverbanks are generally the work of family farmers, while large expanses point to big players. “Nobody cuts down 100 hectares with a chainsaw. It involves giant machines, without a doubt,” Trancoso says. “If we know the type [of deforester], it’s easier to control and define policies to combat it.”
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https://news.mongabay.com/2021/04/large-scale-deforesters-emboldened-under-brazils-bolsonaro-data-indicate/