100,000 Hectares of Atlantic Forest Lost in Three Years
By Fabiana Frayssinet, Inter-Press Service, May 29
RIO DE JANEIRO - Stretched out along the coastal zones of 17 of Brazil’s 26 states, an area marked by a high level of agricultural and industrial development, the Mata Atlântica or Atlantic Forest lost more than 100,000 hectares in the last three years, mainly due to urban expansion and economic growth.
The "Atlas of Mata Atlântica Remnants", released May 26 by the Fundação SOS Mata Atlãntica and the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), studied the vulnerable ecosystem in 10 states.
The report says that in the period studied, 2005 to 2008, 102,938 hectares of forest were cut down, maintaining the same deforestation rate as during the previous three-year pierod: an average of 34,121 hectares a year.
Of that total, says the Atlas, 59 cases involved areas larger than 100 hectares, for a combined total of 11,276 hectares, while 76 percent of the cases involved less than 10 hectares.
Mario Mantovani, the director of the São Paulo-based Fundação SOS Mata Atlãntica, blamed the loss of forest cover on urban growth. Some 112 million people live in the 10 states focused on by the study – around 61 percent of Brazil’s total population of 189 million, according to the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE).
That population is distributed throughout 3,222 municipalities, 58 percent of the country’s total.
The experts say only 11.4 percent of the original Mata Atlãntica, an ecosystem that includes tropical forests, semi-deciduous forests, dry forests and shrub savannahs, still survives today. And that remnant is increasingly fragmented in areas that are more and more isolated from each other.
The report, presented at an online press conference, calls attention to three states that it describes as "the champions of deforestation."
In first place is Minas Gerais in the southeast, where 32,700 hectares were destroyed between 2005 and 2008. The authors of the report attribute the deforestation there to growth of agriculture and real estate speculation, along with coal mining and the steel industry.
The Mata Atlãntica originally covered 46 percent of Minas Gerais. But less than 10 percent is left. INPE official Flavio Ponzoni said the forest cover is now basically limited to the hilltops.
According to Marcia Hirota, one of the heads of SOS Mata Atlântica, the Brazilian Environment Institute must be strengthened in order to curb the deforestation.
"People must urgently be made to understand that our lives depend on the forests, and they must be drawn into participating in the effort to protect this seriously threatened ecosystem," said Hirota.
In order to achieve that, effective government and legislative action is needed, said Hirota, the lead author of the Atlas, who explained that because of the growing threats to the forest, the publication would be coming out every two years from now on.
The second-largest deforested area - 25,900 hectares – is in the southern state of Santa Catarina. The environmentalists attribute the destruction of the forest there to what they describe as "civil disobedience," because authorities in that state have failed to comply with national environmental regulations for the preservation of protected areas.
The states of Bahia in the northeast and Paraná in the south are in third and fourth place, with 24,100 and 9,900 hectares deforested, respectively.
The report underlines that these states are the most "critical" cases because they have the largest proportions of forest and thus have the largest areas deforested in absolute terms.
Environment Minister Carlos Minc said a draft law aimed at protecting the Mata Atlântica is finally about to be signed into law, after it spent 15 years making its way through Congress.
The law will provide a framework for establishing urban planning and zoning guidelines and for blocking, for example, the construction of roads in order to prevent further deforestation.
But each specific development project involves complex negotiations, said Minc, because the regions in question have large urban populations and powerful economic interests.
That is the case of the southern state of São Paulo, which has remnants of the Mata Atlântica. In that area, said Mantovani, environmentalists are worried that sugar cane plantations linked to industrial-scale production of ethanol fuel will encroach on areas currently dedicated to other agricultural activities or tree plantations, which are in turn expanding into forested zones.
In the face of the "alarming" deforestation of the Mata Atlântica, environmental organisations, companies and local authorities have reached a pact to recuperate 15 million hectares of the ecosystem by 2050.
The area to be reforested would be equivalent to 10 percent of the original Mata Atlântica, which is considered one of the most biodiverse areas in Brazil. Sixty percent of the ecosystem’s species are endangered. (END/2009)
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