The international statistic of the decade, chosen by the Royal Statistical Society (RSS), is: The Amazon rainforest lost 24,000 square miles to deforestation over the past decade. That’s the equivalent of 8.4 million soccer fields, 10.3 million American football fields, or losing Hawaii, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Massachusetts all in one go.
The RSS is a British organization comprised of a group of international statisticians. Liberty Vittert, a visiting scholar at Harvard University and one of the statisticians on the judging panel for the RSS, told CNN:
The statistic only gives a snapshot of the issue, but it really provides an insight into the dramatic change to the landscape that has occurred over the past decade.
Those figures were calculated using deforestation data from Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) and FIFA’s regulations on pitch dimensions.
Stretches of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest miles long have been converted for commercial use since 2010. Such applications include logging, cattle ranching, and palm oil production. Not only are these industries responsible for depleting our oxygen supply through deforestation, but they are also emitting millions of metric tons of carbon emissions every year.
Vittert said:
If you look at what the Amazon provides, [the issue of deforestation] provides an example of what’s happening worldwide with short-term financial gains trumping long-term financial loss and environmental loss.
Since 2012, deforestation has been accelerating. It all began in the 1970s, peaking in 1995 and slowly declining its rate of destruction until 2012 when it surged back up again.
Amazon is also known as “the lungs of the earth” because it produces a significant amount of the world’s oxygen supply and helps regulate the temperatures of the entire planet. It’s also home to 10% or more of the world’s biodiversity.
Over two-thirds of the Amazon reside in Brazil, a terrifying fact at the moment since the current president considers the country’s economy more important than the environment. In recent months, under the control of Brazil’s far-right leader President Jair Bolsonaro and his government, the rates of destruction have been skyrocketing. Environmentalists say it’s a sign that his policies have started to take effect.
Since assuming office at the beginning of 2019, Bolsonaro has taken a pro-business stance by vowing to recover the Brazilian economy at the expense of the Amazon. He calls it exploring the rainforest’s economic potential, which is a more delicate way of saying deforestation for money. Loggers, farmers, and miners have taken full advantage of relaxed controls on deforestation and seized on rainforest areas for development.
In addition to making things easier for these industries to plow and burn down the Amazon for land, the government has also been hindering the efforts of organizations working to keep deforestation under control. For example, the country’s environmental enforcement agency, the Brazilian Environment and Renewables Institute (IBAMA), saw its budget cut by $23 million this year. Furthermore, data shows that since Bolsonaro was sworn in the number of operations that IBAMA conducted had gone down.
To top it all off, the head of the INPE was fired after the government agency found a steep rise in Amazon deforestation. But in the end, the month of November saw a rate of deforestation reach the highest level in 11 years.
