Environmental movements have warned that the devastation of the Brazilian Amazon has increased considerably in the last four years. | Photo: WWF

Brasilia, August 13 (RHC)-- Brazil's National Institute of Space Research (INPE) reports that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon grew 32 percent during the month of July, after registering 1,487 square kilometers of devastated native vegetation, being the highest reported so far in 2022.

The agency indicated that the area lost between August 2021 and July 2022, the reference period for the annual measurement, was 8,590 square kilometers.  For its part, the Climate Observatory (CO) explained that this figure is almost similar to that reported in the same month last year, stating that the situation "continues to be very serious."  

In addition, it highlighted in a report that "Jair Bolsonaro is now the only president, since the beginning of satellite monitoring of the rainforest (in 1988), to see deforestation grow during three consecutive years of his mandate."

For OC's executive secretary, Marcio Astrini: "It is another staggering number, but not surprising: the out-of-control deforestation in the Amazon is the result of a meticulous and very well implemented strategy of Bolsonaro and his generals to dismantle socio-environmental governance in Brazil." 

For her part, the representative of the World Wildlife Forum (WWF) in Brazil, Mari Napolitano, specified to an international agency that "between January and July there were about 5,470 square kilometers affected, which is evidence that deforestation stabilized at quite high rates in this biome in recent years."

In 2018, before the current Brazilian president took office, 7,536 kilometers of forest were razed, 34 percent less than in 2019, 44 percent less than in 2020 and practically half of what was registered in 2021, with 13,038 square kilometers.