According to a new research, environmental criminals in the Brazilian Amazon have decimated an area of public forests the size of El Salvador during the past six years, yet the Federal Police – Brazil’s equivalent of the FBI – has conducted only seven operations to combat the tremendous loss.
The damage happened in “unclaimed” federal and state forests, which means they don’t have a specific use like national parks or indigenous lands. Official data shows that there are about 580,000 square kilometres (224,000 square miles) of these types of forests in the Brazilian Amazon. This is almost the size of Ukraine.
Since Brazil has made it legal for invaders to stay on public land more than once, these public forests have become the main target of criminals who stay on land without permission.
The study was done by a Brazilian think tank called the Igarapé Institute. It looked at 302 environmental crime raids that the Federal Police did in the Amazon between 2016 and 2021. Only 2% were aimed at people who were staying on public land without permission.
The report said that the lack of vigilance is probably because the law doesn’t protect those areas very well. In other words, the same problem that brings in people who do bad things. Environmentalists have been asking the federal government for a long time to turn these public forests that are not being used into protected areas.
After two decades of military rule, Brazil returned to democracy in 1985. Since then, most governments have taken steps to increase legal protection. Official data shows that about 47 percent of the Amazon is now in protected areas. But President Jair Bolsonaro, who is on the far right, has said again and again that the country has too many protected areas. He also stopped this policy after it had been in place for decades.
In 2016, illegal logging took place on about 2,240 square kilometres (865 square miles) of unclaimed public land. Last year, it was almost twice as much. Based on official data, the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) says that the total area lost over the past six years is 18,500 square kilometres (7,100 square miles).
Destruction of forests is getting worse, especially in those places. In 2016, they were responsible for 31% of illegally cut down forests. Last year, they were responsible for 36%.
According to a study done every year by the Brazilian non-profit network Climate Observatory, almost half of Brazil’s climate pollution comes from cutting down trees. The damage is so bad that a study published in the journal Nature in 2021 found that the eastern Amazon is no longer a carbon dioxide sink, which is a place that takes in carbon dioxide, and has become a source of carbon dioxide for the planet.
Igarapé divides environmental crimes in the Amazon into four main categories: illegal logging, illegal mining, and deforestation caused by farming or raising cattle.
The police worked in 846 different places because most of the people they looked into were at the beginning of the illegal supply chains. Almost half of them were in protected areas like the Yanomami Indigenous Territory, which has a growing number of illegal gold miners even though there are more police there.
The Igarapé study also showed that there was a large “regional crime ecosystem” because police operations took place in 24 of Brazil’s 27 states and 8 cities in countries next to Brazil. “Illegal economies that reach consumer and financial markets outside of the Amazon are behind environmental crimes,” the report said.
