2023-06-29 00:00:00
The deforestation caused enormous losses globally during 2022, the year in which the Earth lost an area of selva tropical virgen equivalent to a football field every five seconds, with more than half of that destruction occurring in Brazil and Bolivia.
According to the most recent study by the World Resources Institute (WRI), “the total area burned or logged, more than 41,000 square kilometers, is equivalent to the area of Switzerland or the Netherlands.” The researchers explained that they are native and mature trees and that the figure represents an increase of 10% compared to the previous year.
Prepared from satellite images, the report highlights the situation in the amazon basin: losses in Brazil represented 43% of the total and in Bolivia 9%. This is one of the factors that influence the growing manifestations of climate change.
2022 was the fourth most devastating year for primary forests in two decades. “Since the turn of the century, we have seen a hemorrhage in some of the world’s most important forest ecosystems, despite years of efforts to reverse that trend,” said Mikaela Weisse, director of WRI’s control deforestation program.
“Tropical forests destroyed last year released 2.7 billion tons of CO2 into the atmosphere, equivalent to the fossil fuel emissions of India, the world’s most populous nation,” the expert explained in statements to the press.
The situation in Brazil
Deforestation in Brazil increased 15% in 2022 over the previous yearand the outlook has been devastating in recent years.
The conservative government of Jair Bolsonaro has been widely criticized by environmentalists in the last four years for its environmental policies and his successor, the center-left leader Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, has promised to make the defense of the Amazon one of his main axes of government. .
Brazil was the country in which the largest areas of forests were lost in 2022.
Defenders of the economic development of the South American giant argue that much of this deforestation occurs on private land. In parallel, scientists warn that if the Amazon basin were to become savannah, that is, a surface without trees, the consequences for the planet would be terminal.
The Amazon It retains in its forests some 90,000 tons of CO2, which represents twice the world’s annual emissions.
The advance of deforestation in Bolivia
The loss of forests in Bolivia also accelerated by regarding a third last year, with the amount of logging in the country trailing only its neighbor Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The South American country lost around 3,860 square kilometers in 2022, according to Global Forest Watch.
Bolivia is one of the few nations that two years ago refrained from signing a commitment to zero deforestation by 2030. This would have interfered with supporting the agricultural industry, a key economic engine for which large areas have been cleared for soybean and cattle farms.
“The scenario is not good, less forests mean that our microclimate is changing,” said Marlene Quintanilla, director of research at the Friends of Nature Foundation (FAN).
The vast majority of deforestation is caused by human industries.
“Thirty years ago, there was no large-scale meat industry in Bolivia,” said Daniel Larrea, who coordinates technical-scientific research at Conservación Amazónica (ACEAA). And he assured that “stopping deforestation is a titanic challenge because a large part of Bolivia remains uncultivated and it is necessary to recover the economy”.
Fires, some related to land clearing, have also played a significant role in forest loss in recent years, according to the Global Forest Watch report. Urbanization, road infrastructure and mining are other minor drivers of forest clearing.
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