Federal agents are executing warrants at Twin Cities daycare providers

MPR News helps you turn down the noise and build shared understanding. Turn up your support for this public resource and keep trusted journalism accessible to all. 

Turn Up Your Support

Brazil's Amazon rainforest saw its highest annual rate of deforestation in over 15 years, the latest data shows, after a 22 percent climb from the previous year.

The country's space research agency monitoring system showed that the region lost over 5,100 square miles of rainforest — comparable to about the size of the U.S. state of Connecticut — between August 2020 to July 2021, 

 published on Thursday. That's the worst annual loss since 2006, when the Brazilian Amazon shed more than 8,800 square miles.

Until President Jair Bolsonaro took office, the Brazilian Amazon hadn't recorded an annual loss above 3,000 square miles of deforestation in over a decade. Bolsonaro, who has chipped away at Brazil's environmental protections and minimized rainforest shrinkage

since becoming president in 2019, has been 

About 1 million Indigenous people, and 3 million species of plants and animals, live in the Amazon, according to the environmental advocacy group Greenpeace.

Although Bolsonaro did not attend this month's United Nations climate conference in Glasgow, his country joined other nations in agreeing to end illegal deforestation, in addition to promising to 

, from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research's PRODES (Program for Calculating Deforestation in Amazonia) is dated Oct. 27 — four days before the start of the Glasgow summit.

"This is the real Brazil that the Bolsonaro government tries to hide with fantastical speeches and actions of greenwashing abroad," Mauricio Voivodic, the executive director for the World Wildlife Fund in Brazil, 

 in a statement after the PRODES report published. "The reality shows that the Bolsonaro government accelerated the path of Amazon destruction."  

Environmental News

Emma Bowman

Author

Deforestation in the region rose 22 percent compared to the year prior, according to data released just days after Brazil made new global promises to combat environmental degradation.

Amazon deforestation in Brazil hits its worst level in 15 years

Go Deeper.

Like this?

News you can use in your inbox