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Em português

Pilot Program to Conserve
the Brazilian Rain Forest

The Brazilian Amazon occupies more than half of Brazil’s territory. It covers about 5 million km², a vast area equal in size to about half the continental United States or more than the territories of 25 European countries. One-fifth of the world’s fresh water cycles through its river system. The Amazon is the largest remaining tropical forest region in the world. Together with the Atlantic Forest, it contains a diversity of plant and animal life found nowhere else on earth. At least 1,750 more species of fish live in the Amazon than in all of the Mississippi River, and a single tree in the Amazon may harbor more ant species than in all of Great Britain.

The forests play other vital roles as well. They help to maintain the local climate, protect watersheds, and provide raw materials for crafts and industry. By storing carbon, they help to control global warming. The Amazon rain forests are also home to millions of people, including rubber tappers, nut gatherers. fishermen, small farmers, and indigenous people, who depend on the forest for their livelihood.

Today this natural resource is threatened. Large-scale deforestation in the Amazon began in the late 1960s. By 1998 cutting and burning had destroyed some 550,000 km² – an area larger than Germany and Denmark combined – or some 14 percent of the original forest area of the Amazon (estimated at 4 million km²).

The pace of deforestation, which had declined from 21,000 km² a year in 1978 – 1988 to 11,000 km² in 1991, increased again in 1995. In that year alone some 29,000 km² of forests were cleared, an area almost the size of Belgium. Deforestation slowed again in 1996 (to 18,000 km²) and 1997 (to 13,000 km²), then rose again in 1998 (to 16,000 km²).

These figures, the result of an enormous Brazilian effort to map changes in the Amazon forest cover using LANDSAT images, do not reflect the damage caused by logging and fires occurring beneath the tree canopies, which satellite images do not capture. Recent estimates indicate that such hidden forms of forest degradation occur over an area roughly half as large as the area actually cleared.

Bordering Brazil’s prime agricultural and industrial regions, the Atlantic rain forest has been progressively decimated since the 1500s, but the devastation has accelerated over the past 40 years. Today only about 7 percent of the original forest remains. Degradation of this resource is a serious problem because the forest is the richest ecosystem in the world in terms of endemic species (those that occur only in a particular area). Many plants and animals native to the Atlantic rain forest – such as Brazil wood (after which the country is named) or the golden lion tamarin monkey – occur only in the Atlantic Forest. Without decisive efforts to conserve this ecosystem, many plant and animal species could become extinct.