In 2 Months, Area Of Xingu Basin 2X Size Of New York City Deforested - 196 Trees Per Minute

[hatrack]

A hundred and ninety-six trees per minute. That’s how fast the forest was being cleared in Brazil’s Xingu River Basin between March and April this year. A total of 29,191 hectares (72,132 acres) of Amazon rainforest was lost, an area twice the size of New York City, according to a report published this week. The area in question straddles the border between the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, and is the source of the mighty Xingu River, one of the main tributaries of the Amazon River. The deforestation recorded in the March-April period is 40% higher than the same period last year.

The report was authored by Rede Xingu+, a network of 25 Indigenous peoples’ organizations, traditional community associations and civil society institutions from across the Xingu River Basin. It shows that rates of deforestation were higher at the margins of the BR-163 road, known as the “soy highway,” where around 6,000 trucks pass every day. The road is one of the main corridors for transporting the soy produced in Mato Grosso to the inland port of Miritituba on the Tapajós River in Pará, where the grain is loaded onto ships that sail out to the Atlantic via the Amazon River, and on to the rest of the world.

The researchers analyzed forest loss around a 200-kilometer (125-mile) section of the highway, from the state border in Mato Grosso to Castelo dos Sonhos district in the municipality of Altamira, Pará. Along a 5-km (3-mi) strip on either side of the highway, deforestation increased 360% in the first four months of the year compared to the same period of 2020, going from 591 to 2,717 hectares (1,460 to 6,713 acres).

The highway cuts across the Xingu River Basin and within a few kilometers of one of the most important ecological corridors in the Amazon: the Xingu Corridor of Socioenvironmental Biodiversity. The corridor spans some 26.5 million hectares (65.4 million acres, bigger than the state of São Paulo) and is home to 21 Indigenous reserves and nine protected areas, known in Brazil as conservation units.

EDIT

https://news.mongabay.com/2021/07/deforestation-surges-in-xingu-one-of-amazons-most-important-basins/

[secondwind]

1. Truly terrifying....... what Bolsonaro has done to

Mother Earth.