September 7, 2018 11:54 AM EDT
I was recently invited by the editors of the journal Tropical Conservation Science to write an update of a 2013 article on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon that I had published with Sarah Roquemore and Estrellita Fitzhugh. They asked me to review how deforestation has changed over the past five years. The most notable result, as you can see from the graph in the just-published article (open-access), is that overall it hasn’t changed. And that’s actually quite surprising.
November 30, 2015 9:36 AM EDT
Shortly before I arrived here in Paris for the climate negotiations, Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research released the annual figure on Amazon deforestation for 2014–2015. This number comes out each year about this time, and is eagerly awaited as a sign of whether the dramatic progress that Brazil made over the past decade in reducing deforestation by three-fourths, is continuing.
November 14, 2013 5:35 PM EDT
This morning, Brazil released its annual data on the rate of deforestation in the Amazon over the past year. But unlike previous years, this year’s figure doesn’t show continued progress. Read more >
November 27, 2012 7:19 PM EDT
Over the past several years, one of the few pieces of hopeful news about global warming has been the annual release of data from Brazil on its rate of Amazon deforestation. Since forests are immense storehouses of carbon, deforestation causes high levels of greenhouse gas emission. Brazil, which contains about 60% of the Amazon forest, is key to those emissions, and over the last six years it has made important progress in reducing its deforestation rate.
Today, the new data for 2011-2012 were released, and once again they are a ray of sunshine on an otherwise gloomy day. They show a decrease of deforestation to 4,656 square kilometers – down 27% from last year.
Read more >
June 15, 2012 9:50 AM EDT
Yesterday marked the official start of the Rio+20 pre-meetings, with government negotiators and NGO staff descending on Riocentro convention center (which, despite its name, is some 25 miles from the center of Rio) by the thousands. Read more >
