Amazon deforestation over 762,000 km² in 40 years, study says
It estimates that the occupation of the Amazon rainforest has already destroyed about 42 billion trees over 40 years
A report has revealed that accumulated deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has (un)covered 762,979 square kilometers of the biome over the past 40 years. This is an area three times as big as the state of São Paulo, or 184 million football fields.
The study, called “O Futuro Climático da Amazônia” (“An outlook for the Amazon climate in the future”), was led by Antonio Donato Nobre, of the Center for Earth System Science, National Institute for Space Research (INPE), and was released Thursday (Oct. 30) in São Paulo.
Combining information from several other similar studies, the report is designed to make more than 200 research and scientific papers more generally accessible, in an attempt to address what the researcher called a “lack of information” about environmental problems.
It estimates that the occupation of the Amazon rainforest has already destroyed about 42 billion trees over 40 years, which would be equal to more than 2,000 trees per minute, non-stop. And considering both deforestation and degradation (green areas that have been made useless), the footprint of destruction gets as high as over 2.062 million km².
As the researchers pointed out, deforestation can pose a threat to the ability of the Amazon rainforest to lower the atmospheric pressure, convey its moisture to other areas through the so-called “flying rivers”, and regulate climate. Scientists are still studying its impact on the Southeast region of Brazil, more specifically in the state of São Paulo, where a very harsh dry season has meant serious trouble, but Nobre believes that it may be partly resulting from the Atlantic Forest deforestation and global warming.
“It's like being in a sort of climate ICU,” the researcher said, adding that it is hard to tell whether the “patient” – the Amazon rainforest, in this case – can ever recover. “When someone is in ICU, can the doctor tell when the patient is going to die? No, he can't. What I'm doing here is [precisely to] report [a problem]. And I think there is a way out of this: stop all deforestation right now and start reforestation as a war effort,” he said.
Nobre urged “planting trees everywhere, not only in the Amazon,” and went on to note that it goes far beyond planting eucalyptus trees as has often been the case, because they are not very suited to this purpose of creating favorable conditions to make it rain. Moreover, he pointed out the government has an important role to play, along with legal enforcement agencies, NGOS, and the scientific community. “We can work out agreements that benefit everyone,” he said.
While deforestation has decreased in recent years, Brazil remains the world's leading deforester, said Claudio Amarante, WWF Brazil. “It's been ten years since Brazil started reducing deforestation, but other countries in the Andean Amazon, like Bolivia, Peru, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador, have been in an opposite trend – the pace of deforestation is increasing there,” he completed.
According to Amarante, the efforts to end deforestation in Brazil are now entering a much more challenging phase: to focus on small areas of deforestation, which can barely be detected by satellites. “Until now, we have been able to stop deforestation that it was easier to address and more blatantly illegal, in larger areas that are easier to detect. Now we have to focus on small areas of deforestation, and small properties or settlements,” he said.
Translated by Mayra Borges
Fonte: Amazon deforestation over 762,000 km² in 40 years, study says
