Amazon forest clawing back

2009-11-13 19:08

Brasilia - Brazil experienced the smallest loss of its sprawling Amazon rainforest over the past year in more than two decades, the government said, attributing the change to its tougher environmental policies.

The region, considered the world's "lungs" for its capacity to absorb carbon emissions, still lost 7 000km² of rainforest between July 2008 and July 2009.

But that was 45% less than what was lost during the previous 12 month period to inroads by ranchers, loggers and other human development in the planet's largest expanse of tropical forest, officials said.

"It's by far the best result we've seen since INPE began its study in 1988," the director of Brazil's National Institute of Spatial Research (INPE), Gilberto Camara, told President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva and his environment minister at a meeting here on Thursday.

Camara said deforestation in the Amazon basin has "fallen significantly" and steadily since 2004, when some 27 000km² of forest disappeared.

Steady drop

The 7 000km² lost in the 2008-2009 period compared to 12 900km² in the previous 12-month period, Camara said.

INPE's estimates have a 10% margin of error, he added.

Officials credited the steady drop in deforestation in part to the "Arco Verde-Terra Legal" programme that brings together 43 Amazon localities to practice sustainable farming, and regulates land transfers in the Amazon basin.

Lula's administration has made deforestation control the centrepiece of its fight against global warming and aims to reduce clearing in the Amazon by as much as 80% by 2020.

"Brazil is going to give the world a gift," said Environment Minister Carlos Minc.

"We are going to do a lot, and we are also going to demand a lot" from the industrialised world, he said.

Minc attributed the slowing pace of rainforest loss to the government's efforts to shut down illegal logging operations and require that settlers have title to their land.

But Paulo Adario, director of the Greenpeace environmental group's Amazon campaign, said that while the past year marked a significant improvement, "a lot of the Amazon forest is still falling".

A US study published in October in the journal Science found that the scope of the forest's degradation is twice as great as previously estimated due to selective logging under the forest canopy.

The study by researchers at the Carnegie Institution compared high resolution satellite data to on the ground field reports to reach its conclusion.

- SAPA