Devastation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest fell by 61% last January, the first time without Jair Bolsonaro as president of Brazil. The data was published by INPE, the National Institute for Space Research, which monitors the forest in real time.
In January, 167 square kilometers of forest were destroyed by fires or falling trees, according to INPE, which came under fire from Bolsonaro’s four years in office for publicizing the invasion and destruction of the Amazon. A year earlier, in January 2022, at the beginning of the last year of the former president, the area of deforestation was 430 square kilometers, much more than was recorded when Bolsonaro came to power, in January 2019, which was 130 square kilometers. square kilometers.
Precisely because this was the last year of Jair Bolsonaro’s presidency and the occupiers feared that the new president, Lula da Silva, would take measures to drastically reduce the rate of devastation in the Amazon, illegal farmers and pastoralists, lumberjacks and miners attacked the forests with extraordinary fury, trying to maximize their tenure while the president was in power, defending the occupation and commercial exploitation of the forest. Thus, 2022 ended sadly as the year of the biggest devastation in the Amazon since INPE began monitoring forests, with an impressive 10,573 square kilometers cleared this year.
The reduced devastation in the Amazon confirmed in January did not even require Lula’s vigorous forest conservation measures, which only began to be implemented on the ground in February of this year, such as in the Yanomami reserve in the state of Roraima, which was captured by the occupiers. more than 20 thousand miners. With Bolsonaro’s defeat in last October’s presidential election and his flight to the United States on the eve of losing his mandate and the immunity that his office gave him, the Amazon destroyers felt helpless and without the guarantee of impunity that the former ruler had given them, and they stopped cutting trees and burning open glades, fearing reprisals from the new government.
Author: Domingos Grilo Serrinha This Correspondent in Brazil
Source: CM Jornal
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