Under president Lula deforestation fell 60% compared to last July
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In a rare piece of environmental good news, recent satellite analysis shows that deforestation rates have slowed in the Brazilian part of the vast Amazon rainforest.
The world’s largest rain forest, the Amazon, covers some 5,500,000 sq km (2,100,000 sq miles), and the jaguar’s share is found in Brazil. However, since the early 1970’s it’s been estimated that 20 per cent of the Amazon has been cleared – mainly for ranching, logging and other forms of farming.
The rates of deforestation have always varied year on year, but they soared between 2019 and 2022 when right-wing politician and renowned climate-change sceptic, Jair Bolsonaro was the Brazilian president. Under his presidency, environmental laws were scaled back, and Indigenous lands in the Amazon were opened to commercial exploitation.
This degrading of environmental laws meant that in 2021, deforestation in the Amazon had reached a fifteen-year high.
This rate of deforestation mattered to us all because the estimated 390 billion trees in the Amazon act as a vital carbon sink and, through the action of photosynthesis, they produce between six to nine per cent of the world’s oxygen. So important is the Amazon to the world’s health that it’s often described as the ‘lungs of the world’.
Not only did the increased rates of deforestation in the Amazon under Bolsonaro make no environmental sense, but by some estimates it made no economic sense either. It’s been estimated that the economic losses through deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could be around seven times higher than the profits made from all the commodities produced through deforestation. It’s a statistic that jars against Bolsonaro’s claims that he was opening up the Amazon to economic development.
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Presidential elections were held in Brazil in late 2022. These were won by left-leaning, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who is frequently known as Lula. Since taking office in January of this year, Lula has worked to restore environmental protection laws that had been rolled back under his predecessor and to gather international support towards protecting the Amazon. And just seven months later, this new approach is having a positive impact.
Recent analysis of satellite data produced by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) has shown that although deforestation continues, the rates are declining fast. In the seven months from when Lula first took office through to July 2023, the overall decline in deforestation was 42 per cent less than over the same period in 2022 and if current patterns continue, it will be the lowest level of deforestation since 2018.
But, even better news is that the decline in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon seems to be speeding up month on month, with the same satellite analysis revealing that in July 2023, there was a 66 per cent decline in deforestation compared to July 2022.
And there’s hope to believe that this downward trend might continue. This is Lula’s second stint as President after he served two terms between 2003-2010. When Lula came to power back in 2003 the rates of deforestation in the Amazon were at an eight-year high. But under his administration, deforestation dropped considerably – some estimates say by as much as 83 per cent, and that by the end of his second term, deforestation was at its lowest level in 22 years.
The Amazon is still a long way from safe, but under President Lula it’s the safest it has been in almost a decade.
