Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro fired the country's chief of the National Institute of Space Research in early August, after the space agency announced a spike in the deforestation of the Amazon rainforest. Bolsonaro — who wants to open up more of the jungle for agriculture — called the satellite observations "lies."
The data certainly don't reflect a sustainable use of the densely forested tropical land, much to Bolsonaro's chagrin: Between August 2017 and July 2018, Brazil's space agency documented 2,910 square miles of loss — an area about half the size of Connecticut.
The story of the Amazon — in which one Brazilian state lost an area of rainforest larger than West Virginia by 2003 — is reflected around the globe. A new major U.N. climate report entitled "Climate Change and Land" details that human land use now impacts over 70 percent of the ice-free land on Earth; and since 1961, natural lands equaling around two-thirds the size of Australia have been converted into agriculture. The planet's forests, rangelands, and greater vegetation, however, play a dominant role in stabilizing the Earth's climate, as land systems absorb around a quarter of human-generated carbon emissions — Read more...
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