Amazon deforestation – 4,340 rainforest football fields cleared every day – News

• Rainforest deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon continues to grow strongly.
• Between August 2019 and July 2020, 11,088 square kilometers of jungle were cleared in the region, said Inpe, the space agency responsible for monitoring the rainforest.
• Compared to the same period last year, deforestation increased by 9.5%.

This means that approximately 4,340 football fields or three football fields per minute are cleaned every day. The deforested area was the largest since 2008.

Since the rainforest in the Amazon can bind immense amounts of CO2, it is also of great importance to the global climate. However, Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro sees untapped economic potential in the region and wants to open up even more land for agriculture, mining, and power generation. He rejects international criticism of his environmental policy as interference in internal affairs.

Bolsonaro’s politics: “backward view”

“The Bolsonaro government’s development vision for the Amazon region takes us back in time, with deforestation rates that have not been achieved since 2008,” said Cristiane Mazzetti of the environmental organization Greenpeace. “It is a retrospective view that most Brazilians do not like and does not do justice to the efforts needed to tackle the climate crisis.”