Brazil is seeing a lot more green – especially after slashing its rate of Amazonian deforestation by almost 90% within the past decade.
The decline began in 2005 after Brazil became more aggressive in its efforts to protect the Amazon basin. The country began creating protected areas and designated more than half of that land for use in national parks.
As GoodNewsNetwork reports, Brazil also placed a moratorium on soybeans, a highly-prized crop grown on deforested Amazon land. In addition, satellites were – and still are being – used to monitor farming and industrial activity, and the country has employed people on the ground to enforce environmental laws.
Conserve, an eco-conscious blog, has collected and shared a lot of information on how all of this was accomplished. For example, immense pressure was put on multi-national corporations to stop the clear-cutting, causing them to eventually agree to throttle back their operations.
In result, the number of square miles of rainforest cleared in a single year has been reduced from 10,500 in 2005 to 1,850 in 2015. As TrueActivist has shared before, individual and collective effort does matter – no matter how futile activism might seem in the present moment. For example, Shell recently declared it will stop drilling in the Arctic! Clearly, magnificent things can happen when people work together.
Overall, the Amazonian deforestation rate in Brazil is now one-sixth of what it was in 2004. It has dropped from a peak of 27,400 square kilometers cleared per year to just 4,800.
This momentous achievement, according to research at Tropical Conservation Science, makes it easier to envision a future in which that rate is dropped to zero within the next decade.
As the Amazonian rainforest produces one-fifth of the world’s oxygen, protecting the valuable resource is in everyone’s best interest.
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