Environmental criminals in the Brazilian Amazon have destroyed public rainforests equal to the size of El Salvador over the past six years, yet the Brazilian Federal Police carried out only seven operations aimed at the massive loss, a new study showed.
The destruction took place in state and federal forests that are “unallocated,” meaning they do not have a designated use the way national parks and indigenous territories do. The Brazilian Amazon rainforest has about 580,000km2 of forests in this category, or an area almost the size of Ukraine, the official data showed.
As Brazil has repeatedly legalized such invasions, these public forests have become the main target for criminals who illegally seize land.
Photo: AFP
The study, from Igarape Institute, a Brazilian think tank, analyzed 302 environmental crime raids carried out by the Federal Police in the Amazon from 2016 to last year. Only 2 percent targeted people illegally seizing undesignated public lands.
The report said that the lack of enforcement likely stems from the weak legal protection of these areas. Environmentalists have long pressed the federal government to turn these unallocated public forests into protected areas.
Since Brazil’s return to democratic rule in 1985 after two decades of military rule, most successive governments have moved to extend the legal protection, and about 47 percent of the Amazon now lies within protected areas, official data showed.
Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly said the country has too many protected areas and stalled the policy.
In 2016, 2,240km2 of unallocated public land was illegally deforested. Last year, it reached almost double that amount. Over six years, the accumulated loss has reached some 18,500km2, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute said, citing official data.
Deforestation is increasingly taking place on these lands in particular. In 2016, they made up 31 percent of all illegally felled forest, while last year, they reached 36 percent.
Almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from deforestation, an annual study from the Brazilian nonprofit network Climate Observatory showed.
The destruction is so vast that the eastern Amazon has ceased to be a carbon sink and has become a carbon source, a study published last year in the journal Nature showed.
Igarape divides environmental crime in the Amazon into four major illicit or tainted activities: theft of public land, illegal logging, illegal mining, and deforestation linked to agriculture and cattle farming.
The enforcement operations were spread over many locations, 846, because most investigated deep into illegal supply chains. Nearly half were in protected areas, such as the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, which, despite a heavier police presence, is being invaded by thousands of illegal gold miners.
The Igarape study also pointed to an extensive “regional ecosystem of crime.”
“Environmental crime stems from illicit economies that access consumer markets and financing outside the Amazon,” the report said.
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