Deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon fell 33.6% in the first six months of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s term compared to the same period in 2022, the government said.
On Thursday, June 7, 2023, the Brazilian government reported a 33.6% decrease, based on satellite images taken by the Space Research Institute. From January to June, 2,649 square kilometers (1,020 square miles) of rainforest were cleared, they said. The figure is less than the 3,988 square kilometers recorded in the first six months of 2022 when President Jair Bolsonaro was in office.
“We have achieved a steady downward trend in deforestation in the Amazon,” Environment Minister Marina Silva told a press conference. In June, the decline in deforestation was even more significant, at 41% compared to June 2022. Silva said the good results were thanks to Lula’s policies to combat climate change and deforestation of the world’s largest rainforest.
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During Bolsonaro’s 2019-2022 presidency, Amazon deforestation increased by 75% compared to the previous decade’s average. Last month, Lula unveiled an ambitious plan to tackle illegal logging in the Amazon, just days after opposition lawmakers in Congress approved changes stripping some key powers from Brazil’s environment ministry.
In April, a study by the monitoring network Global Forest Watch showed that tropical forests the size of Switzerland disappeared around the world last year due to increased logging.
It is estimated that around 11 football fields of forest will be lost every minute by 2022, with Brazil dominating the destruction. This shows that the political pledge made by world leaders at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021 to halt deforestation is working.
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest and 60 percent of it is in Brazil. It is often referred to as the “lungs of the planet” due to the sheer number of trees that grow there, which is because trees absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen.
Source: bbc.com, mediaindonesia.com
