Between 1985 and 2023, the opening of pastures accounted for 90% of the deforestation recorded in the Brazilian Amazon, which lost 14% of its native vegetation in 39 years, according to satellite images analyzed in a study released today by MapBiomas.
During this period, the growth of pastureland in the Brazilian Amazon was more than 363%, from approximately 12.7 million hectares to 59 million hectares - an expansion of 46.3 million hectares in just under four decades.
As a result, in 2023, around 14% of the Brazilian Amazon will be pasture, according to the images analyzed by Mapbiomas, a multi-institutional initiative involving universities, non-governmental organizations and technology companies, focused on monitoring transformations in land cover and land use in Brazil.
Pastures have also advanced over the wetlands of the planet's largest tropical forest, which lost 3.7 million hectares (5.65%) between 1985 and 2023.
Of this total, the survey indicated that 3.1 million hectares were converted into pasture and 441,000 hectares were transformed into agricultural areas.
“When we analyze what has been mapped as water surface in the Amazon over these 39 years, we see an increase in area that is caused by the creation of anthropogenic water bodies, such as dams and reservoirs in the region,” said Luis Oliveira, a researcher at Imazon and the Amazon team at MapBiomas.
“However, if we extend the analysis to all the wetland classes (Water, Floodplain Forest and Flooded Field), we can see a downward trend in wetlands in the Amazon, which may already be a strong indication of climate change in the biome,” he added.
The three Brazilian states with the greatest expansion of pasture in the period were Tocantins (from 33% to 74% of the state's area), Maranhão (from 14% to 48%) and Rondônia (from 6% to 39%).
The satellite images collected by Mapbiomas also showed that direct deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon for agriculture between 1985 and 2023 peaked in 2004, with 147,000 hectares destroyed directly for agricultural use, but fell dramatically in the following years, influenced by the soy moratorium.
Even so, in the specific case of agriculture, there was an increase in the area of forest cleared for planting between 1985 and 2023 of 4,647%, or 47 times.In the period analyzed, the agricultural area went from 154,000 hectares to 7.3 million hectares.
Almost all (97%) of the agricultural area mapped in the Brazilian Amazon was used for temporary plantations, with soybean predominating, accounting for 80.5% of the total. The area of sugarcane has increased progressively, from 192 hectares in 1985 to more than 90,000 hectares in 2023, or 1.23% of the total agricultural area in the biome.
The area dedicated to forestry increased from 3,200 hectares in 1985 to 360,000 hectares in 2023 - an increase of more than 110 times in 39 years.
55.3 million hectares of native vegetation have been lost in the last 39 years in the Brazilian Amazon, or 14% of the total.
Of this total, 50.4 million hectares were forested, which was the type of land cover that lost the most area in this period, going from 336 million hectares in 1985 to 285.8 million hectares in 2023.
Last year, 81.3% of the Amazon was covered by native vegetation.
“The amount of native vegetation removed in the last 39 years is alarming and the continuation of this loss could lead the region to the so-called point of no return, or 'tipping point',” warned Jailson Soares, a researcher at Imazon and the MapBiomas Amazon team.
“At this stage, the Amazon biome would lose its capacity to maintain essential ecological functions and to recover from disturbances such as burning and logging, resulting in irreversible degradation of the forest,” he concluded.
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