Last Year Brazil Lost Forest Area Equivalent To Two Football Pitches, Every Minute

In 2020, another devastating year for a resource deemed crucial to curbing climate change, deforestation destroyed the equivalent of more than two football pitches per minute in the Brazilian Amazon, according to government data released Friday.

Using its DETER tracking software, which analyses satellite images to track monthly destruction, the Brazilian space agency INPE identified 8,426 square kilometres (3,253 square miles) of Amazon rainforest lost to deforestation in 2020.

AP

That was the second-most devastating year for Brazil's share of the world's biggest rainforest since the program was launched in 2015.

The amount of forest destroyed was only larger in 2019, when the figure came in at 9,178 square kilometers.

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Another satellite monitoring programme known as PRODES, which analyses deforestation once a year in greater detail, is also run by the Brazilian space agency.

Environmentalists emphasised that these were also the first two years in office for far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who slashed support for conservation initiatives and pushed agribusiness and mining to open up protected Amazon lands.

"The two years of the Bolsonaro administration have been the worst two years (of deforestation) recorded in the DETER program. That's no coincidence. It's the result of the current government's policies of environmental destruction," AFP quoted Marcio Astrini of the Brazilian Climate Observatory, a coalition of environmental groups, as saying.

Reuters

In Brazil, the world's largest exporter of beef and soybeans, the devastation is primarily driven by farmers, ranchers and land speculators who bulldoze trees and burn them to make room for crops and pasture; catastrophic wildfires have also been fueled by that.

In the Brazilian Amazon, the number of fires rose 16 percent last year, to more than 103,000 in total.

The Pantanal wetlands to the south were also destroyed by fires, a biodiversity paradise which last year saw an estimated one-quarter of its surface area go up in flames.