The government says that in the first six months of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s term, deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon fell by 33.6% compared to the same time period in 2022.
It looks like the jungle shrunk by 2,649 square kilometers from January to June this year, compared to 3,988 square kilometers during the same time period last year under President Bolsonaro.
The government satellite data has not been checked by a third party.
Lula has promised to stop deforestation, or the cutting down of trees, by the year 2030.
But he will have to work hard to reach this goal, as more than three times the size of New York City’s area of jungle has been lost under his rule.
In the last few years, there has been a worrisome rise in the loss of forests.
The Amazon jungle is a key part of the fight against climate change around the world.
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On Thursday, the National Institute of Space Research of Brazil (Inpe) showed off the new satellite data.
“We have reached a steady downward trend in the deforestation of the Amazon,” said Marina Silva, who is in charge of the environment.
Inpe said that compared to the same time last year, the number of trees cut down in June dropped by a record 41%.
Lula has promised to change the policies of his far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who encouraged mining on indigenous lands in the Amazon. Lula took office in January.
In the beginning of this year, Lula made six new indigenous reserves, where mining is illegal and industrial farming is limited.
Indigenous leaders were happy about the change, but they made it clear that more places needed to be protected.
And while it was said that fewer trees were being cut down, more fires were being recorded.
Only in June, satellites found 3,075 fires in the Amazon, which was the most since 2007.
Many of the fires, which put out a lot of carbon dioxide, have been linked to the clearing of places that had already been cleared of trees.
Lula, who was president of Brazil from 2003 to 2010, has also been pushing for the world’s wealthiest countries to pay for different projects to save the jungle.
In April, study from the Global Forest Watch monitoring network showed that the world lost an area of tropical forest the size of Switzerland due to a rise in tree clearing.
It said that in 2022, about 11 football fields worth of forest were lost every minute, with Brazil being the country that lost the most forest.
It showed that world leaders’ promise at the UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow in 2021 to stop cutting down trees was a long way off.
The Amazon is the world’s biggest rainforest, and Brazil has 60% of it.
Because there are so many trees there, people often call it “the lungs of the planet” because the trees take in carbon dioxide and give off oxygen.
