Africa-Press – Cape verde. More than half of the entire deforested area in Brazil in 2023 occurred in the Cerrado, transforming this Brazilian biome into the area with the most devastated native vegetation in the country, a position previously occupied by the Amazon, MapBiomas announced today.
The organization states, in its Annual Deforestation Report (RAD), that, in the last five years, Brazil lost 8,558,237 hectares of native vegetation. However, data collected by the same organization indicated that 2023 represented a turning point in this process, as it registered an 11.6% drop in the deforested area.
In total, 1,829,597 hectares of native Brazilian vegetation were removed in 2023 compared to the total of 2,069,695 hectares destroyed a year earlier. This reduction occurred despite an 8.7% increase in the number of alerts compared to 2022.
In 2023, for the first time, there was a predominance of deforestation in biomes with formations similar to the savanna (54.8%), followed by forest formations (38.5%), which predominated in the first four years of the survey carried out by the organization.
Mapbiomas highlighted that Brazil’s two largest biomes, the Amazon and the Cerrado (which has characteristics similar to the savanna), account for more than 85% of the total deforested area in the country last year.
“In 2023, the Cerrado accounted for 61% of the deforested area across the country and the Amazon 25%. There were 1,110,326 hectares deforested in the Cerrado in 2023, an increase of 68% compared to 2022. Almost all deforestation in the country (97%) had agricultural expansion as a vector”, highlighted the organization in a statement with the main data from the report.
“The data points to the first drop in deforestation in Brazil since 2019, when the publication of the RAD began. On the other hand, the face of deforestation is changing in Brazil, focusing on biomes where savanna and grassland formations predominate and reducing in formations forestry”, added Tasso Azevedo, coordinator of MapBiomas.
Last year, the average area of native vegetation destroyed in the South American country per day was 5,013 hectares or 228 hectares per hour, according to MapBiomas. More than half of the destruction occurred in the Cerrado, where 3,042 hectares of native vegetation were lost per day. In the Amazon, 1,245 hectares were lost per day, which is equivalent to around 8 trees per second.
In the Amazon, the deforested area in 2023 was 454.3 thousand hectares, indicating a drop of 62.2% compared to 2022.
Of the 559 municipalities in the Amazon biome in Brazilian territory, 436 recorded some type of forest destruction in 2023, or 78% of the total. In all 10 municipalities that deforested the most areas in the Amazon there was a drop.
“There was a reduction in the average size of alerts and in the deforested area in most states [in the Amazon] (…) On the other hand, there is a possible displacement of this deforestation, which is growing in other biomes, particularly in the Cerrado, which presented the largest deforested area in Brazil in 2023”, concluded Larissa Amorim, from MapBiomas.
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