Brazil’s VP says country won’t meet deforestation reduction target

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Brazil will not be able to achieve the goal of reducing deforestation in the Amazon by 10% in the reference year from August 2020 to July 2021, Vice President Hamilton Mourão, head of the National Council for the Legal Amazon (CNML), admitted Monday, August 2.

“I probably won’t achieve what I envisioned as our task, which is to achieve a 10% reduction. I think it will be between 4% and 5%,” the general said in Brasilia.

According to the Prodes satellite observation system of the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), which publishes its reports in November, deforestation in the Amazon between August 2019 and July 2020 was 10,851 km², an area larger than that of Puerto Rico and an increase of 7.13% over the previous 12 months.

Deforestation exceeded 10,000 km² in these two periods for the first time since 2008, and this could be repeated if the reduction is limited to 5% (which would be 10,308 km²).

Inpe has another, less sophisticated system for daily deforestation alerts called Deter, which shows that destruction in the Amazon reached a fourth consecutive monthly record of 1,062 km² in June.

The government is seeking to improve its image in the international community, questioning the environmental policies of President Jair Bolsonaro, who favors opening the Amazon to agriculture and mining.

This year, for the second year in a row, the government mobilized military troops to fight environmental crimes.

Mourão, on the other hand, highlighted that the number of fires in the Amazon in July decreased by 27% (4,977 fire sources) compared to the same month in 2020, which he attributed to the actions carried out by the Ministries of Environment and Justice, so he did not consider it “necessary” to continue using the armed forces for this task.

The non-governmental organization Greenpeace recalled that the fires are areas that were recently “deforested and degraded” and “will be illegally burned in the coming months.”

“The worst is yet to come. Apart from the fact that the coming months will be drier in the Amazon, the environmental authorities continue to be weakened, and Congress has as one of its priorities the approval of legislative amendments that favor even more environmental destruction and the invasion of public lands,” stressed the environmental representative of the organization, Cristiane Mazzetti.

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