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Brazil’s Amazon rangers battle farmers’ burning business logic
November 15, 2012
Brazil’s Amazon rangers battle farmers’ burning business logic
As Evandro Carlos Selva, one of the 1,400 hi-tech environmental cops, fly over the Amazonian inferno via helicopter, he radios back to a base a witness testimony to deforestation. As forests are being burned, smoke billows across the horizon releasing the carbon that has been stored in the forest for hundreds of years into the atmosphere.
The clearance is illegal and Carlos Selva, a ranger with Brazil’s environmental protection agency, Ibama, sets in motion the process of levying fines, business embargos and other penalties that have helped slow the pace of deforestation by almost 80% in the past eight years. This represents an impressive progress but the pressure convert more Amazonian forest is growing stronger due to drought in the US, rising food prices, and a weakening in Brazilian laws. Farmers and ranchers are continuously converting protected forests into cropland illegally.
Rangers use two sets of satellite data: Prodes, which is an annual forest audit down to the level of 6.25 hectares and Deter, which provides real-time information to rangers in the field who can reach the affected areas rapidly via helicopters and trucks. Individual violators can be fined, jailed, have machinery confiscated and be barred from access to bank loans.
However, with limits to these satellite data such as cloud cover and as information needs two days to be processed, farmers still find ways to expand their cropland through deforestation. An upgrade will be made next year with the help of two new satellites and with this, data processing will be accelerated and the chances of rangers catching forest degradation at an earlier age will be increased.
Read more at The Guardian.
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