As the presidential term of far-right wing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro comes to an end, the Amazon is being torn apart at record rates. An area of the vital forest, bigger than cities like New York or Bengaluru, was degraded this October, according to INPE, Brazil's National Institute for Space Research.
Brazil's President-elect Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva could take the direction of conservation efforts on a remarkable turn as he promises his administration will put the country into a responsible guardianship of the Amazon, one of the world's most valuable rainforests and key to controlling climate change.
This October, logging, mining, fires, and illegal activities have deforested or are in the process of deforesting or degrading the forest at the highest rate since INPE began record-keeping in 2015.
INPE accumulates real-time deforestation alerts it receives from the Deter Deforestation Alert System which makes daily reports of signs of changes in forest cover for areas larger than three hectares.
The report, issued this November 11, shows Brazil in danger of not meeting targets for greenhouse gas emissions set in the 2015 Paris Climate Agreement, which aims to limit the planet's temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius by the end of the century.
The culprit: the increase in the rate of deforestation during the Bolsonaro administration.
It has been a deliberate policy of the Bolsonaro government to ignore and weaken the country's environmental protections and to disregard enforcement of its Paris Agreement commitments.
Last year, the Amazon lost a forest area equivalent to 1.6 million football fields, bigger than the big island of Hawaii, some 10 times the size of Delhi. This represented an increase of 22 per cent compared to 2020, the third year of consecutive increase.
In 2021, Brazil emitted 2.42 billion gross tons of CO2 equivalent, according to Climate Observatory's Greenhouse Gas Emissions Estimate System, SEEG. This year's figures represent the highest increase in greenhouse gas emissions in 20 years.
Deforestation is the primary cause of the increase in emissions. In Brazil, it has been the indigenous communities that have traditionally best protected the forest.
A UN report tracking back to 2000 showed that in the 12 years of the initial study, in regions of the Amazon within indigenous lands in Brazil, Bolivia, and Colombia, deforestation rates were a fraction of neighboring areas.
Bolsonaro, who won the presidency promising to reopen the Amazon for business, took a position that indigenous peoples have rights to far too much of Brazil's territory, encouraged invasions of the forest by mining and agribusiness, and permitted cattle grazing in forest lands.
Cattle raising alone accounts for 75 per cent of deforestation in public lands, says the Institute of Environmental Research of Amazonia, IPAM.
According to a February report by IPAM, forest clearing in the Amazon was 56.6 per cent higher between August 2018 and July 2021, the period since Bolsonaro became president than in the same period from 2015 to 2018.
Now the October report shows a record increase in deforestation. Satellite image reports show that about 17 per cent of the Amazon is now gone, and scientists fear that when that figure reaches 25 per cent, the forest will reach a tipping point where regions of the lush forest will begin to degrade, making it into a transitional savanna with spotty shrublands.
Parts of the Amazon already release more CO2 than they sink and crossing the tipping point to a transition to savanna would accelerate the process, risking making global warming an out-of-control process.
This year's UN Climate Conference, COP-27 in the tony Red Sea resort town of Sharm El Sheikh, Egypt is focusing on the implementation of the Paris Agreement by developing countries like Brazil.
Bolsonaro has treated Amazon deforestation as a public relations problem for his failure to explain his focus on sovereignty over American and European influence. Behind that argument, however, his administration allowed record levels of deforestation.
His administration put Brazil as an ally to environmental scofflaws, it has failed to implement protection laws, and has encouraged deforestation. Under him, Brazil has sent a presentation designed to avoid the topic of deforestation, choosing to focus on green energy.
Lula, who has built a reputation as an environmentally responsible leader, has raised expectations for a turning point at COP-27 by promising to aim for a deforestation level. He has sent a large delegation to the conference, and his presence this coming week is anticipating announcements that put Brazil at the center of the fight against climate change.
