<
https://news.mongabay.com/2024/11/brazil-plans-new-reserves-to-curb-deforestation-near-contested-amazon-roads/>
"As climate change wreaks increasingly devastating droughts, hurricanes and
storms, preserving the world’s remaining large blocks of standing forest has
become a matter of survival. However, 47 million hectares (116 million acres)
of forest in the Brazilian Amazon, an area nearly the size of Cameroon, remain
unprotected.
These are unallocated public lands, which aren’t designated as conservation
units or intended for traditional populations like Indigenous peoples or
Quilombolas, Afro-Brazilian communities established by formerly enslaved
people.
“It’s a huge area without designation, which makes land grabbers or even
politicians interpret it as no-man’s land,” Paulo Moutinho, senior researcher
at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), told
Mongabay.
According to Brazil’s space agency, INPE, from August 2021 to July 2022, 28% of
deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon occurred in unallocated public lands.
Even in 2023, when deforestation rates plummeted by half across the rainforest,
these areas saw an increase of more than 30% in clearing, according to IPAM.
At the current pace of destruction, billions of tons of carbon dioxide could be
released into the atmosphere, threatening the fight against global warming and
the water supply in Brazil, which faced its worst drought ever recorded in
2024.
“We’re going to create a hole in the flying rivers,” Moutinho said, referring
to the wind flows that take moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and the Amazon out
to the rest of the country, securing water for agriculture, human consumption
and energy generation. “The destination of this enormous forest mass is almost
a question of the country’s security.”
In this race against time, Brazil’s government has produced a plan indicating
critical federal areas to be prioritized for allocation. According to the
document obtained by
Mongabay through freedom of information requests, “the
delay in allocating public lands puts them in the sights of land grabbers and,
consequently, illegal deforestation.”"
Via
Fix the News:
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Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
