Tuesday, May 26, 2020
The deforested area corresponds to eight cities in São Paulo. Unprecedented survey covers all Brazilian biomes
The first Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil, released today (26/05), shows, in an unprecedented way, the loss of native vegetation detected in all of the country's biomes in 2019. For the first time, deforestation alerts for the national territory were analyzed and consolidated in a single survey, showing that Brazil has lost at least 1,218,708 hectares (12,187 km²) of native vegetation, an area equivalent to eight times the size of the city of São Paulo.
More than 60% of the deforested area is in the Amazon, with 770,000 hectares devastated. The Cerrado was the second most deforested biome, with 408,600 hectares. Close behind are the Pantanal (16.5 thousand hectares), the Caatinga (12.1 thousand hectares) and the Atlantic Forest (10.6 thousand hectares).
The Amazon and Cerrado are the best monitored biomes, with continuous monitoring systems adapted for their respective regions. As the other biomes use data from a global system, without adaptations for specific conditions (types of vegetation, climate and landscape seasonality, for example), the values calculated are considered conservative, i.e. they may be underestimated.
MapBiomas Alert is a system for validating and refining alerts on deforestation, degradation and regeneration of native vegetation, using high-resolution images, launched in June 2019. The analysis starts with the alerts generated by the Deter (INPE), SAD (Imazon) and Glad (University of Maryland) systems. The data is validated and refined with the support of high-resolution satellite images (three meters), which make it possible to identify deforested areas with great precision.
"Based on this methodology, the first Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil was developed, which details in time and space where deforestation is taking place in the country. The analysis of each alert generates a report that can be used by all agencies - public and private," says MapBiomas coordinator Tasso Azevedo. The alert reports are available on the internet at: alerta.mapbiomas.org.
The methodology developed by MapBiomas Alerta makes it possible to measure the speed of deforestation on an unprecedented scale. Thus, it was possible to point out that the fastest deforested area in 2019 is in the municipality of Jaborandi (BA), with 1,148 hectares, between May 8 and 27, reaching an average of 60 hectares per day. In terms of the size of the deforestation, the largest area detected was in Altamira (PA): in a single event, 4,551 hectares of Amazon forest were cut down.
The states with the most events were: Pará (18.5 thousand), Acre (9.3 thousand), Amazonas (7 thousand), Rondônia (5.3 thousand) and Mato Grosso (4.7 thousand). In terms of deforested area, the top of the list is occupied by: Pará (299,000 ha), Mato Grosso (202,000 ha) and Amazonas (126,000 ha).
When the ranking is organized by municipality, half of all deforested areas are in 50 municipalities. Of the ten with the most deforestation in 2019, four are in Pará, three in Amazonas, one in Bahia, one in Mato Grosso and one in Rondônia. In total, 1,734 municipalities had areas of deforestation detected in 2019.
Another fundamental aspect: the cross-referencing with territorial layers, such as Conservation Units, Indigenous Lands and rural properties, carried out using the Rural Environmental Registry (CAR), data from vegetation suppression authorizations and forest management plans.
More than three quarters of the alerts overlap with at least one property registered in the CAR. There were 42,600 rural properties with registered alerts, which represents 0.7% of the more than 5.6 million properties registered in the CAR. Just over a third of the alerts (38%) totally or partially overlap legal reserve areas, permanent preservation areas or springs and less than 1% have a vegetation suppression authorization registered. "The report indicates that the rate of illegal deforestation is extremely high, to the extent that legal deforestation is more the exception than the rule," Azevedo concluded.
About MapBiomas: a multi-institutional initiative involving universities, NGOs and technology companies, focused on monitoring changes in land cover and land use in Brazil. Website: mapbiomas.org.
Watch the presentation by Tasso Azevedo, MapBiomas coordinator, at the launch of the Annual Report on Deforestation