Firefighters and volunteers in a fire in the Brazilian Amazon in September.Carlos Ezequiel Vannoni / EFE
The National Institute for Space Studies (INPE), in charge of monitoring deforestation in Brazil, released this Friday the September data in the Legal Amazon, an area delimited by the Government that includes nine Brazilian states with Amazonian vegetation and that corresponds to 59% of the territory of the country.
According to the federal agency, 964 square kilometers of Amazon rainforest were on deforestation alert in September, the second worst figure for the month since the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (DETER) began to issue alerts on forest cover, in 2015.
The largest deforestation area under alert in a month of September was in 2019, when DETER indicated a risk in 1,454 square kilometers of the Legal Amazon.
Since 2015 the alerts have been increasing year after year: 497 square kilometers that year, 691 square kilometers in 2016 and 746 square kilometers in 2018. Between 2015 and 2018, the monthly average of deforestation alerts issued by DETER was 576 square kilometers.
Since 2019, when Jair Bolsonaro assumed the presidency, the monthly figure increased to 1,189 square kilometers.
According to the Climate Observatory, a network made up of 52 non-governmental organizations and social movements, the fires in the Amazon between May and September were 21% more extensive compared to the same period last year.
Among the nine States that are part of the Legal Amazon (Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondonia, Roraima and Tocantins), Pará was where the largest area of alert status was registered: 426 square kilometers, followed by 184 from Mato Grosso and 157 from Rondonia.
São Félix do Xingu, in Pará, was the municipality that deforested the most, with more than 70 square kilometers.
For five months, the Brazilian vice president, Hamilton Mourão, who directs Operation Green Brazil 2, has deployed part of the Armed Forces to fight deforestation and fires in the Amazon.
Even so, the Climate Observatory warns that, during the driest months of the year (from May to September), which correspond to the work of the Operation, deforestation is double that of the previous three years.
Deforestation is being the Achilles heel of the Government, attracting criticism and national and international pressure from civil society and even from private initiative, which is afraid of losing business abroad due to the lack of results in this area.
The Brazilian government received a letter from ambassadors from eight countries, in addition to a manifesto signed by banks, companies and investment funds demanding more effective action to protect the Amazon and, more recently, the Pantanal.
Still, President Jair Bolsonaro, like Mourão, are adopting a speech that denies their responsibility.
Bolsonaro came to blame the indigenous people during his intervention in the UN General Assembly, even though all the evidence points to the action of landowners in both the Amazon and the Pantanal, as indicated by the investigations of the Federal Police this year and last year.
“The deforestation figures remain high and unacceptable.
While the vice president demonstrates the same denial of the president and the Minister of the Environment in the face of the environmental crisis, criminals roam freely in the Amazon, knowing themselves unpunished ”, affirms Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory.
"This attitude produces destruction, capital flight, carbon emissions and commercial damage, as we have seen this week with the announcement of the European Parliament not to ratify the agreement between the European Union and Mercosur", he completes.
The objective of the Deforestation Detection System is to emit daily signals of alteration in the forest cover of areas of more than three hectares, which serve both totally deforested areas and those that are on alert for forest degradation.
Despite pointing out the areas that the Brazilian Institute of the Environment has to supervise, DETER is not responsible for the disclosure of official deforestation rates.
These indices, which are those considered by the federal government, are measured by PRODES (Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Legal Amazon by Satellite), another INPE body, which publishes the data once a year, taking the period between August and July.
During the 2018 and 2019 academic year, the PRODES index was 42% higher than that published by DETER for the same period.