A landslide in Manaus, Amazonas state capital, last Sunday (12) hit 11 houses in the Jorge Teixeira neighborhood, in the east of the city, which caused eight deaths. The tragedy caused by heavy rains led Mayor David Almeida to declare a state of public calamity.

According to a study by the collaborative network of NGOs MapBiomas, Manaus is the city with the largest expansion of urbanized areas in precarious settlements in Brazil. The study points out that the region where the tragedy occurred was not registered as a risk area, although it was within a precarious settlement delimited by IBGE.

MapBiomas highlights that human actions have caused major changes in the environment, which led to extreme concern among scholars and environmental defenders. Since 1985, urban occupation in risk areas in Manaus has increased by about 1,319 hectares, equivalent to 10,000 football fields. Manaus concentrates more than 36% of all risk area occupation in the state.

The Brazilian agriculture and cattle-raising sector ended 2022 with a retraction of 1.7% when compared to 2021. The information is from the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), which released on Thursday (2) the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) report for the 4th quarter and for the whole of last year.

“Soy, the main product of Brazilian farming, with an estimated drop in production of 11.4%, was the one that most pulled down the result of Farming in the year, being impacted by adverse weather effects,” explained Rebeca Palis, coordinator of National Accounts at IBGE, in a note.

A study published in Nature magazine proved a clear correlation between deforestation and reduction in rainfall. The researchers found that as more and more forest is removed from tropical areas, the less local farmers will have rain for their crops and pastures. The article raises fears that the degradation of the Amazon is reaching a critical point, after which the rainforest will no longer be able to generate its own rain and the vegetation will dry up.

Deforestation in the Legal Amazon region showed a reduction of 61% in January 2023, compared to the same period last year, according to the National Institute for Space Research (INPE). The total deforested area in the region was 167 km², compared to 430 km² in January 2022.

On the other hand, deforestation in the Brazilian Cerrado more than doubled compared to the Amazon, reaching 441.85 km² in January. The deforested Cerrado area saw a 10% decline compared to the same period last year, when the figure was 491.64 km². Nevertheless, the deforested area is larger than the entire city of Curitiba – the capital of Paraná state -, which covers 434.892 km².

More than one third of the Amazon Rainforest is already affected by drought, fires, logging and the” edge effects”, according to a study published in the scientific journal Science.

Authored by 35 Brazilian and foreign researchers, the study differentiates between deforestation and degradation. While, in the former, the forest undergoes major changes to make way for a new use – for example, an area that is burned to turn into pasture – degradation is differentiated by involving more changes in forest cover and by not having the objective of transforming the use of that land.

Degradation includes fires; drought (intensified by climate change); selective logging (legal or illegal; “selective” because some commercially interesting trees are removed, leaving others standing); and edge effects (changes in forests near deforested areas, thus a direct consequence of deforestation).

The study estimates that 38% of the Amazon Rainforest is now affected by some type of degradation. “The degraded area in the Amazon and the carbon emissions from degradation are equal or even greater than those from deforestation,” said study leader David Lapola, a researcher at the Center for Meteorological and Climatic Research Applied to Agriculture at Unicamp (State University of Campinas) and a doctorate from the University of Kassel, Germany, to BBC News Brazil.

In 2022, Brazil lost to fire more than 163 thousand km² of forests, the equivalent to the state of Acre (152,581 km²). The area represents an increase of 14% compared to the 142.8 thousand km² recorded in the previous year. The data are from the Fire Monitor, from the Mapbiomas platform in partnership with IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute).

Most of the fires were registered in the Amazon and in the Cerrado (together, the two biomes have 95% of the destroyed area). The fires were concentrated in countryside and savannah regions (43%), formations that are found in the Cerrado, while 25.4% of the affected area was pastureland.

Considering only December, the increase in fires was 93%, compared with the same month in 2021: there were 3,327 km² of burned area last year, compared with 1,748 km² in 2021.

The Indigenous Lands with presence of isolated groups (with little or no contact with outsiders) are the most threatened in the Amazon biome. The conclusion comes from a new study produced by Ipam (Amazon Environmental Research Institute) and Coiab (Coordination of Indigenous Organizations of the Brazilian Amazon).

Data from the National Institute for Space Research (DETER/INPE) revealed that deforestation in the Amazon in November reached 555 km², an increase of 123% compared to the same month in 2021 and the second worst in the historical series, second only to 2020.  The devastated area is the size of the city of Belém, capital of Pará.

In the BR-319 highway vicinity, the municipality of Lábrea (AM) had the largest area with deforestation alerts, reaching 209 square kilometers. The highway had its construction resumed under the Bolsonaro administration and helped consolidate the south of Amazonas state as the new deforestation frontier.

A study by researchers from Fundação Oswaldo Cruz (Fiocruz), Instituto Socioambiental (ISA), Evandro Chagas Institute and Universidade Federal de Roraima (UFRR), showed that fish from three out of four points in the Rio Branco Basin have higher levels of mercury than the limit designated as safe by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO) and the World Health Organization (WHO).

According to the researchers, the closer to the Yanomami Indigenous Land (TI), the greater the risks. “The high rates of contamination observed are probably due to the numerous illegal gold mines installed in the channels of the Mucajaí and Uraricoera rivers”, says the study.

A survey published in The Intercept Brasil shows that the Bolsonaro government ignored 21 requests for help from the Yanomami Hutukara Association. The documents denounced the arrival of miners, criminals and the spread of diseases and hunger in the region.

Mining in Yanomami territory soared during the Bolsonaro government. A report by the Yanomami Hutukara Association shows that illegal mining has tripled in the last three years.

Deforestation alerts in the Amazon had a 22% increase in the month of February compared to the same period in the last year, as partial data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE) points out. By February 25th, 149.88 km² were deforested, the second largest area for the month of february since 2016.

This is the second consecutive record of devastation of the biome in 2022. In January, the Amazon had 430.44 km² of its area with deforestation alerts, a number four times higher when compared to January 2021, and the worst since 2016, also according to INPE.

Even with a presidential decree that prohibited the use of fire as a forestry practice for 120 days in all national territory, data from the monitoring system Inpe indicate that July had an 116% increase in the number of fires compared to the previous month. There were 4,977 hotspots, with more than half in the Amazon states of Pará (1,372 hotspots) and Amazonas (1,173 hotspots). 

Bolsonaro’s decree was an attempt at a public response to the predicted increase in wildfires in regions such as the Amazon and Pantanal due to the beginning of the dry season, considered this year to be one of the most intense ever recorded in the country.

A study conducted by researchers Luciana Gatti, Luana Basso, and Raiane Neves, from the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe), indicates that the Brazilian Amazon now emits more carbon dioxide (CO2) than it absorbs. Deforestation and large-scale burning by human action, scientists say, are the major causes for the change.

The research, published in the scientific journal Nature, was conducted between 2010 and 2018 and identified four main spots in the biome that emit 410 million metric tons of CO2 per year. The most worrisome is the stretch between southern Pará state, a region dominated by agribusiness, the stage for the so-called “Day of Fire” in August 2019, and northern Mato Grosso state.

Ricardo Galvão, former director of Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), exonerated by Bolsonaro in 2019 after reacting to the president’s criticism of the institute’s data indicating increased deforestation, won the international award for Responsibility and Scientific Freedom 2021 of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

The award “honors scientists who have demonstrated scientific freedom and responsibility in particularly challenging circumstances, sometimes at risk to their professional or physical safety,” says the AAAS website. According to Jessica Wyndham, director of the AAAS Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and Law Program, the physicist “acted to protect the well-being of the Brazilian people and the immense natural wonder that is the Amazon rainforest, a world heritage site.”

The Brazilian Air Force signed a US$ 33.8 million contract with a Finnish company for the purchase of a satellite, without due bidding process, whose contract was classified as “reserved”, as the journalist Rubens Valente, from UOL, reported.

Besides the irregularities involved in the process and the questionable effectiveness of the device for monitoring the Amazon forest, scientist Gilberto Câmara, director of the National Institute of Space Research (Inpe) between 2005 and 2012, draws attention to the possible political motivation of the purchase. “This is a poorly explained situation that has, for me, only one justification: the military wants to say that they also have the capacity to measure deforestation to disregard the data from Inpe. The deforestation data bothers the military, who want to have control over it. This expenditure is not justified, it’s absurd. In the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic we are throwing away US$ 34 million when the government doesn’t even have enough syringes for the vaccine,” he declared to UOL.

The Inpe monitoring system has been under constant attacks by the military and other government figures, including President Jair Bolsonaro and the minister of the Environment Ricardo Salles, because of data provided by the entity on deforestation of the Amazon

Indigenous organizations, such as the Javari Valley  Indigenous Peoples Union (Univaja), the Javari Valley Kanamari Association and the Indigenous Peoples Network (APIB), released a statement warning about the arrival of Covid-19 at the Jarinal Village, in the far east of Javari Valley Indigenous Land (TI), Amazonas State, in the Amazon Region. The region concentrates many isolated indigenous groups that are now threatened by the virus.

With the first positive cases confirmed by the Special Secretariat for Indigenous Health (Sesai) among residents at Javari Valley Indigenous Land, the organizations are denouncing the federal government’s disobedience of a Supreme Court order which determined the set up of sanitary barriers to stop Covid-19 spread inside indigenous territories. The Court order came after a lawsuit filed by APIB and political parties to protect the Javari Valley. The deadline for implementing the barriers were ] September 30th, but the government never installed the blockades. The invasion by illegal gold diggers of indigenous lands  is also a driver of the virus spread;  organizations have been demanding control measures against them for months.

A study called “Is deforestation spreading COVID-19 to the indigenous peoples?”, by Brazilian economist Humberto Laudares, affiliated with Genebra University, in Switzerland, points to the correlation between deforestation, illegal gold mining and the contamination of indigenous people with Covid-19. According to the results of the research, conducted in over 5,000 municipalities in Brazil, deforestation and gold mining related to at least 22% of the confirmed Covid-19 cases among indigenous until August 31th. Every new 100 square kilometers of deforestation translates into 2,5 to 5,5 new coronavirus infections among indigenous populations.

On September 15th, vice president Hamilton Mourão accused public servant experts from Inpe, the National Institute on Space Research, of making political opposition to the federal government. According to the VP, positive results about reducing forest fires were not being publicized by the Institute — that is the federal organ in charge of monitoring deforestation in Brazil.  “Someone from the inside is opposing the government. I want to make this very clear here”, he said, citing official data that showed that the country registered 5,000 fire hotspots less in 2020 compared to the same period on January-August 2019. However, data from Inpe contradicts the VP’s narrative, indicating that there were more fires in the Amazon in the first two weeks of September 2020 (20,485 hotspots) than for the entire month of September in 2019 (19,925 hotspots). 

According to satellite monitoring experts, Inpe’s system is unique in the world, allowing real time follow up, data transparency and civil society participation. 

Beyond the attacks coming from the presidential wing, in an inquiry at the Unions Finance Court (TCU) about the purchase of satellite images, the Federal Police declared that Inpe provoques disinformation against new monitoring initiatives in order to maintain control over the narrative and knowledge of deforestation in Brazil. The Federal Police also called Inpe’s work “insufficient” and accused it of not doing enough for public safety. On September 19th, finance court minister Ana Arraes suspended the R$49 million reais contract between the Federal Police and satellite company Planet, alleging that the purchased system does not aggregate advantages when compared to the technology already in use by Inpe. The contract between the Federal Police and the company Planet was funded by the Ministry of Justice. 

Three days later, Norway’s Ministry of Climate and Environment announced an international deal with Kongsberg Satellite Services together with companies Planet and Airbus to supply free, universal access to tropical forest satellite monitoring in the world, including Brazil. According to the Norwegian government, Planet will supply high resolution maps and monthly updated information for visualization and download, as informed by website O Eco.

An extensive cloud of smoke from fires all over the Amazon rainforest covered Manaus, Amazonas State capital, in the first week of September. The rates of forest fires in the region have been breaking historical records since July. According to a report by Amazônia Real, between September 1st and 8th the National Institute for Space Research (Inpe) registered 2,002 hotspots in Amazonas, 170% more than in the same period in 2019, when the state had 742. The State of Pará had a more significant increase, with 3,468 outbreaks of burning, an increase of 253% when compared to the previous year (983 outbreaks). Inpe records and other institutions detected a concentration of fires in the municipalities of Novo Progresso, São Félix do Xingu and Altamira, in Pará, and Lábrea, Apuí and Boca do Acre, in Amazonas.

A study called “The pandemic impact at the Yanomami Indigenous Land: #OutWithGoldminingAndCovid”, by the Socioambiental Institute (ISA) in a partnership with the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), points that almost 40% of the yanomami indigenous people who live close to illegal gold mining areas at the Indigenous Land Yanomami (TIY) may become infected with the new coronavirus. The research considers invading  gold miners as the major vectors of transmission inside the demarcated territory. The report concluded that the Yanomami Indigenous Land is the most vulnerable territory in the Amazon regarding Covid-19,  once it faces high social vulnerability, precarious local health infrastructure and a history of respiratory ailments among its population.

The coordination of the Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (Coica) and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) received reports about an increased flow of illegal Brazilian miners at the Oiapoque river region, Amapa State, who were heading towards the French Guiana. Deutsche Welle Brasil (DW) talked with researchers from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro and the Federal University of Ceará who stated that the Oiapoque is the primary route for smuggling of gold and other minerals illegally obtained. Claudette Labonté, president of the French Guiana Parikweneh Federation and a member of Coica said the police “let their guard down” during the pandemic. In February, the Brazilian government presented a bill that aims to legalize mining in indigenous territories.

The “Bulletin of Legal Amazon Deforestation – January, 2020”, by the NGO Amazon Man and Environment Institute (Imazon) indicated a 74% rise in deforestation rates at Legal Amazon areas, when compared to the same month in 2019. According to the website UOL, there was also an 1382% increase in environmental degradation in the region between January 2019 and January 2020.

Deforestation on conservation units on the Xingu River Basin, on the Amazon states of Pará and Mato Grosso, rose by 44,7% in May and June 2019 in comparison to the same period in 2018. The number confirms the high trending on Amazon deforestation and the increased pressure on one of the key ecological corridors of the  biome. The data was published on a bi-monthly bulletin organized by Xingu+ Network, that gathers 24 local indigenous and environmental organizations. The bulletins condenses data from satellite imagery and radars that detect deforestation even during the rainy season.