Feb. 6, 2009 -- News out of the Brazilian Amazon has been up and down in recent years. After a steep rise in deforestation followed by a sharp drop in recent years, the rate of forest loss was back up slightly last year, according to new figures.
Brazil's National Space Research Institute, called INPE, recently released the numbers. For 20 years, the organization has been mapping forest loss through a program called the Legal Amazon Deforestation Monitoring Project. Every year, INPE scientists analyze dozens of satellite images to see what has changed.
The most recent images showed a loss of 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) of forest from Brazil's Amazonian states between Aug. 2007 and July 2008. That was up nearly 4 percent from the year before, but still nearly 20 percent below the rate of loss two years earlier.
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Reasons for the ebb and flow of forest chopping in Brazil are economic, political -- and complex.
In large part, the number of trees getting slashed in the Brazilian jungle at any given time depends on what's happening in the rest of the world, said William Laurance, a tropical ecologist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama City.
For example, Laurance has documented a direct link between deforestation in the Amazon and prices of soy around the world. In the last few years, biofuel-promoting corn subsidies have pushed many American farmers to switch from growing soy to growing corn. As a result, there has been a 20 percent drop in soy production in the United States, a doubling of global soy prices, and a huge spike in deforestation in Brazil's soy-producing areas, Laurance wrote in a 2007 letter published in the journal Science.
Beef, timber, and other commodity prices also influence the race to cut trees and clear land, as does the strength of the Brazilian currency.
"There are interesting international connections with a lot of this stuff," Laurance said. "It illustrates the impact of globalization and the unintended consequences of what we do."
The Brazilian government has been working in recent years to curb the loss of its precious forests, said Claudio Maretti, Director of Conservation at WWF Brazil in Brasilia.
Maretti points out the country has created tens of millions of hectares of new protected areas with a goal of consolidating and expanding those regions by tens of millions of hectares more. (There are about 260 hectares in a square mile). The Brazilian government also now has targets for reducing carbon emissions. And it has begun investing more in law enforcement to crack down on illegal clear-cutting.
Still, huge obstacles remain. The land is difficult to regulate and, despite its environmental goals, the government continues to fund dams, highways, gas pipelines and other massive infrastructure projects that are, Laurance said, "going to open up the heart of the Amazon like a zipper."
Studies show that major projects like these often lead to waves of rampant land speculation, farming, ranching and environmental destruction that is extremely dangerous and difficult to fight. What's more, chopping the forest into fragments makes each fragment even more vulnerable to logging, wildfires, and other destructive activities.
"Brazil is still losing upwards of one million hectares [3,900 square miles] a year, even in its best years," Laurance told Discovery News. That's equivalent to about two or three football fields a minute," he said.
"I don't think the battle is won by any means."
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