Over the last six years, public rainforests in the Brazilian Amazon equal to the size of El Salvador have been destroyed by environmental criminals, the Los Angeles Times reported. During that time, there were a mere seven operations carried out by the country’s Federal Police to address the large-scale crimes, according to a new study by Brazilian think tank Igarapé.
The study found that relatively little has been done by authorities to address the forest’s destruction—out of 302 environmental crime raids by the Federal Police in the Amazon between 2016 and 2021, only 2% targeted people illegally seizing “unallocated” public lands, according to the Times. Portions of the rainforest that are “unallocated” lack a designation that specifically protects areas such as national parks and Indigenous territory. Criminal organizations have moved in to illegally seize large swaths of the “unallocated” land.
Illegal logging has subsequently surged over the past six years, wiping out 7,100 square miles, according to the Amazon Environmental Research Institute. Brazil President Jair Bolsonaro has stated the country has too many protected areas.
Today, almost half of the country’s climate pollution comes from deforestation, which has also pushed the eastern Amazon into becoming a carbon source for the earth, rather than a carbon absorber, according to nonprofit Climate Observatory and a study published in the journal Nature in 2021.
