Legal Amazonia is an area of more than 5 million km 2 comprising the states of Acre, Amapá, Amazonas, Maranhão, Mato Grosso, Pará, Rondônia, Roraima, and Tocantins. The National Council for Legal Amazonia (CNAL), which oversees the Amazon Plan 2021/2022, responded as follows to Agência FAPESP's request for comment: "The aim was to focus on where the occurrence of illegal environmental activities had most impact on the results of Brazil's environmental management without neglecting the need to act in other areas of Legal Amazonia." Mataveli is a researcher in INPE's Earth Observation and Geoinformatics Division. Some of these deforestation hotspots are in the 11 municipalities, but others are in the vicinity and constitute new frontiers," Guilherme Augusto Verola Mataveli, corresponding author of the article, told Agência FAPESP. "Using this new approach, we concluded that prioritizing areas with higher deforestation rates would be more effective than limiting the monitoring to certain municipalities, This is an important finding, given that the agencies responsible for law enforcement in this case, mainly IBAMA and ICMBio, have had their budgets and staffing steadily whittled down. Furthermore, they stress, it reveals new deforestation frontiers outside the priority area and hence not covered by the official monitoring plan. In the article, scientists affiliated with Brazil's National Space Research Institute (INPE) and universities in the United States conclude that the proposed method would give monitoring and law enforcement a tighter focus. However, while the deforestation hotspots identified by the researchers accounted for 66% of the average annual deforestation rate, the 11 municipalities targeted by the plan represented 37% of the deforestation rate for the last three years (2019-21). In other words, the area to be monitored could be reduced by 160,000 km 2, which is about the size of Suriname. According to an article by the researchers, published in June in Conservation Letters, areas of the Amazon classified as high priority for having the highest deforestation rates totaled 414,603 square kilometers (km 2) this year, while the total area targeted by the plan for the 11 municipalities is 574,724 km 2.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |