Deforestation alerts in the Legal Amazon fell by 10.6% in August this year, compared to the same month in 2023, and by 69.7% compared to August 2022. “It is the lowest rate for the month since 2018 and the second consecutive year with a significant reduction”, informed the federal government, in a statement released on the night of this Friday (13).
In August 2023, the system registered 563.09 square kilometers (km²) under deforestation alert in the Legal Amazon. Last month, it was 503.65 km². The drop is much greater when compared to August 2022, when there were deforestation alerts in 1,661.02 km² in the region.
Nine states make up the Legal Amazon: Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima and Tocantins.
The data comes from the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (Deter-B) of the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), developed to quickly inform regulatory agencies about new changes in forest cover. Deter-B identifies and maps deforestation and other changes in the forest with a minimum area of close to one hectare.
The annual rate of clear-cut deforestation in the Brazilian Legal Amazon has been provided by the Amazon Deforestation Calculation Program (Prodes) since 1988. The images used are from the Landsat satellite, with higher resolution, which exclusively detects clear-cut deforestation of more than 6.25 hectares.
Monitoring systems
Deter and Prodes form the set of systems for monitoring and tracking Brazilian biomeswhich always has as a reference year from August of one year to July of the following year.
From August 2023 to July 2024, deforestation alerts in the Amazon – detected by Deter – fell 45.7% compared to the previous period. The number of 4,314.76 km² deforested is the lowest in the historical series that began in 2016.
The consolidated Prodes deforestation data for 2023/2024 will be released at the end of the year. In the period from August 2022 to July 2023, deforestation in the Legal Amazon reached 9,001 km², which represents a drop of 22.3% compared to the previous year (2021/2022).
In the Cerrado biome, Deter-B found a 9% increase in vegetation suppression from August 2023 to July 2024, compared to the previous period, reaching 7,015 km² of area under alert. In the case of the Pantanal, the area under alert is 1,159.98 km². As this measurement began in August of last year, comparison is not yet possible.
Even with the resumption of environmental policies by the current government – which resulted in successive reductions in deforestation in the Amazon – degradation is also a concern and affects an area three times larger than deforestation. Camouflaged by fragile vegetation, environmental disturbances caused by man advance over biodiversity, far from the reach of satellite images and government monitoring.
