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Deforestation in the Brazilian portion of the Amazon rainforest slowed over the last 12 months by nearly half compared to the previous year, according to new government data.
The country lost 4300 sq km (1700 sq miles) of Amazon, a 46 percent decline, and the largest slowdown in deforestation since 2016, per the Associated Press. On the Cerrado, Brazil’s highly biodiverse savanna, deforestation was up 9 percent compared to last year, however.
The Amazon is the world’s largest rainforest, and two-thirds of it is in Brazil.
It is a crucial natural resource on a number of levels, home to more than 10 percent of Earth’s land-based life, 20 percent of global freshwater, and a carbon sink equivalent to 15 to 20 years of global emissions from human activity that would otherwise contribute to warming the planet.
The government of Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has made stopping deforestation a major priority, a sharp reversal from the far-right government of Jair Bolsonaro, which oversaw a 15-year peak in Amazon destruction.
When Lula took over in late 2022, he promised Brazil was “ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis,” and vowed to reach zero deforestation by the end of the decade.
That puts Brazil in line with the larger goals of the COP26 climate conference, where 145 nations in 2021 vowed to stop deforestation by 2030.
World progress toward that goal is halting, however.
Last year, Brazil and Colombia helped drive the rate of tropical forest loss towards a 9 percent decrease from the 2022 level, but those gains were largely offset by deforestation in other places, according to a study from the World Resources Institute and the University of Maryland.
“The world took two steps forward, two steps back when it comes to this past year’s forest loss,” Mikaela Weisse, Global Forest Watch director for WRI, told Euronews of the study’s findings earlier this year.
Long-term predictions for the Amazon remain worrying.
A recent study published in the journal Nature found that by 2050, the rainforest could face a “tipping point,” under pressure from global warming, changing rainfall, longer dry seasons, deforestations, and fires, that could cause large-scale collapse of key forest systems.
