While the COVID-19 pandemic remains a top priority issue around the world, deforestation in Brazil's Amazon rainforest continues to rise. Only during the month of April 2020, the area of deforestation destroyed in the Brazilian Amazon was 64% higher than in April 2019, according to official government data from Brazil's National Institute for Space Research (INPE), which uses satellites to track deforestation.
INPE's deforestation monitoring system, DETER, documented 1,202 square kilometers of forest that was cut down and burned in the Brazilian Amazon from January 1 to April 30, 2020, a 55% increase over the same period last year .
What is this increase in deforestation?
Many expected deforestation rates to decline due to the coronavirus pandemic ravaging the world and the resulting global economic recession. But the reality is that the opposite has happened. With fewer environmental agents patrolling rainforests and more economic hardship in rural areas, illegal logging has skyrocketed.
While rainforest destruction rates are currently not near record levels in the early 2000s, recent years have seen another resurgence of land "clearing" for logging, mining and ranching.
