Sat 08 October 2022:
Brazil’s Amazon region has experienced record-breaking deforestation in September, continuing a trend that has gotten worse under far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.
In September, 1,455 square kilometers (562 square miles) of rainforest were cleared, according to satellite data from INPE, a Brazilian space research organization. That surpasses the September 2019 record in a data series that started in 2015 and is up 48 percent from a year ago.
Average deforestation in the vital ecosystem has increased by 75 percent from the previous decade since Bolsonaro took office in 2019.
The news of accelerating deforestation takes place as Brazil braces for a contentious election on October 30, where Bolsonaro will face off against former left-wing president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has promised to crack down on deforestation.
“Anyone who cares about the future of the rainforest, the lives of Indigenous peoples and the possibility of having a livable planet should vote to remove Bolsonaro,” Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a coalition of environmental groups, said in a statement.
Many think that the outcome of the upcoming election will determine the fate of the Amazon, a crucial resource in the fight against climate change. Brazil is where about 60% of the Amazon is located.
Bolsonaro, an ally of Brazil’s powerful agribusiness sector, has presided over massive deforestation of the rainforest as ranchers and loggers clear and burn vast swaths of it. During his first year in office in 2019, the worst year on record, 9,178 square kilometers (3,543 square miles) of land were destroyed.
Last week, Lula won the first round, but she fell short of the required 50% threshold to avoid a run-off. Environmentalist organizations are uneasy about Bolsonaro’s unexpectedly strong performance in the first round, where many expected him to lose the election outright.
Authorities are not doing much to stop deforestation in the Amazon, according to a report released in July by the Brazilian think tank Igarape Institute.
The study looked at 302 environmental crime raids conducted by federal police in the Amazon between 2016 and 2021 and discovered that only 2% of them were targeting people illegally seizing undesignated public lands.
Additionally, violence and abuse have been directed at indigenous people and environmental land defenders.
SOURCE: INDEPENDENT PRESS AND NEWS AGENCIES
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