According to official figures released by the Product Monitoring System of the National Institutes of Space Research, deforestation in the Amazon rain forest in Brazil is at a 15-year high.
Important Current Affairs Points
- This is an increase of 22% over 2020.
- According to the data, the Brazilian Amazon lost 13235 square kilometers of rainforest from August 2020 to July 2021.
- This is the highest number since 2006.
Amazon Rainforest
The Amazon rainforest is a humid broad-leaved tropical rainforest located in the Amazon biome. It covers most of the Amazon Basin in South America. The basin covers an area of 7,000,000 km2. 5,500,000 km2 of this area is covered by rainforests. This region includes territories of nine countries. Most of the forest (60 percent) is in Brazil. Peru is next with 13% and Colombia with 10%. Small forests are found in Bolivia, Guyana, Ecuador, Suriname, French Guiana, and Venezuela. The Amazon represents more than half of the remaining rainforests on Earth. This includes the largest and most diverse area of tropical rainforest, with 390 billion individual trees divided into 16,000 species.
Deforestation of the Amazon
The main causes of deforestation in the Amazon are human habitation and land development. By 2018, 17% of the rainforest has already been destroyed. Wildfires are another cause of deforestation. In 2019 alone, there were 72,843 fires in Brazil, more than half of which were in the Amazon region. In June 2019, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased by more than 88 percent compared to 2018.
