On Tuesday, the environmental platform MapBiomas revealed that Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro had ignored 97 percent of the monthly deforestation warnings issued by the National Institute of Space Research (INPE) since he took office in 2019.
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According to INPE measurements, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021 was the largest in the last 15 years, with over 13,000 square kilometers of devastated native vegetation.
However, during the Bolsonaro administration, government environmental control actions in the Amazon have only been adopted in 13 percent of this rainforest’s affected zones.
According to the MapBiomas platform, Brazil’s deforestation record coincided with the year with the lowest number of monitoring operations by the Brazilian Environment Institute (IBAMA) in the last five years.
In three years of government, Bolsonaro has fully fulfilled his electoral promises of ending the demarcation of Indigenous lands and boosting economic exploitation of the Amazon rainforest.
Unsustainable industrial activities have increased significantly during this far-right president's administration, and the IBAMA has suffered budget cuts and lost officials.
“The news alerting about the pollution and the irreversible destruction of the Amazon is silly since they are spread by people who want to affect the image of my country,” Bolsonaro alleged.