Law enforcement didn’t answer to 97% of deforestation alerts, study says

By March 2022, over 97% of the deforestation alerts issued since the beginning of Bolsonaro administration weren’t answered to, according to a survey by the MapBiomas initiative. The area with enforcement operations, however, represents 13.1% of deforestation detected since January 2019.

The data comes from the “Deforestation Surveillance Monitor” online platform, which presents “in a direct, updated, and transparent way the data on deforestation authorizations and enforcement actions by the federal government” and the state governments of Goiás, Minas Gerais, Mato Grosso, São Paulo, and Pará, explains the project’s website. “There are important advances, especially in the states, but the Monitor data show that impunity still looms large when we talk about illegal deforestation in Brazil,” says Tasso Azevedo, general coordinator of MapBiomas.

According to a report released by the Climate Observatory at the beginning of the year, the environmental agency Ibama failed to execute about 60% of the budget for environmental crime control in 2021, a year in which the country broke successive deforestation records.