Amazon Rainforest Loss Sharply Down Under Brazil's Lula. Carbon Cost Of Yeeting Bolsonaro Into Sun Was Maybe Worth It.
55.8 percent reduction of deforestation in less than a year! Now, about the rest...
In an encouraging development for the fight against climate change, a new report shows that deforestation of the Amazon rainforest was sharply down in 2023, with 55.8 percent less forest loss than in 2022. The reduction in deforestation is even sharper compared to two years ago, with two-thirds less rainforest lost last year than during the peak loss year of 2020. This is pretty damned impressive considering that the Amazon basin is vitally important to absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere.
The report, from Amazon Rainforest’s “Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project” (MAAP), uses satellite data to track deforestation across the nine countries that contain the rainforest, and finds that in 2023, forest loss was down in Brazil, Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. (The report adds that deforestation increased slightly in three countries, Suriname, Guyana, and Venezuela, during 2023, “but this seems to be mostly due to natural causes,” which Reuters explains includes things like tree losses due to high winds.)
Analysts say much of the change can be directly attributed to the election of leftist governments in Brazil and Colombia. Brazil has the largest portion (60 percent) of the rainforest, and has seen the biggest decline in deforestation.
After Brazil’s Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva was elected last year to replace rightwing president Jair Bolsonaro, Lula set to work reversing Bolsonaro policies that emphasized cutting down rainforest for mining, cattle ranching, and other extractive industries. (At least once he stopped an attempted coup by Bolsonaro supporters.) Brazil also toughened up its enforcement of environmental laws Bolsonaro had largely ignored. Under Bolsonaro, environmental law enforcement jobs went unfilled, and agencies responsible for protecting the rainforest and indigenous rights had their budgets gutted.
Bolsonaro was also notoriously indifferent to massive wildfires in 2019, accusing scientists of exaggerating the amount of deforestation and insisting that “the Amazon is ours,” to be exploited for economic growth, even as he insisted like a common Trump that he would magically preserve more rainforest than any other leader.
Here’s MAAP’s chart of Brazilian rainforest loss, in case you were wondering whether Bolsonaro fulfilled that pledge. It’s in hectares, which are metric acres. (Fine, one hectare = 2.47 acres, or a “hogshead.”)
The report isn’t all rosy, of course, because even though deforestation is at its lowest rate since 2019, the Amazon still lost an area roughly the size of Puerto Rico in 2023. Even so, the rapid decline in just one year suggests to Carlos Nobre, earth systems professor at University of Sao Paulo, that Amazon countries will be able to fulfill their 2021 pledge to end deforestation by 2030.
The MAAP study estimates, based on satellite data, that the Amazon contains “over 37 billion metric tons of carbon,” which Reuters helpfully explains would, if released into the atmosphere due to rainforest destruction, be “roughly equivalent to 2.5 times the greenhouse gas emissions from all sources globally in 2022, from coal power plants to cars, according to European Union data.”
So let’s not do that, please. Nobre told Reuters that the new data on slowing loss of rainforest means “Amazonian countries will have incredible power during COP28,” the annual climate talks that begin today in Dubai. Brazil and other countries are seeking financial help from richer countries to help continue to protect the rainforest, which for Crom’s sake should be an easy decision.
[Reuters / MAAP / Photo: Neil Palmer for the Center for International Forestry Research (CIFOR), Creative Commons License 2.0]
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I feel like Bolsonaro's yeeting into said sun was not literal enough.
The Amazon rainforest is a feast of beauty, water, birds, grasses, and weird little bugs, which birb do not like, but are okay too because that's nature and nature is cool as fuck.
Yipee yay for thee beautiful people of Brazil and Mr. Lula.