Search

While Brazil publicly committed to reduce deforestation in Amazonia at the 26th Conference of the Parties (COP26), the Brazilian parliament is moving toward weakening environmental laws. Deforestation rates continue ascending, reaching in 2021 the highest value since 2006 (13,235 km2). To overcome this paradox, strategies to curb deforestation are mandatory. The current strategy, "Plano Amazônia 21/22," prioritizes law enforcement actions to curb illegal deforestation in only 11 Amazonian municipalities. Here, we show that this prioritization is likely to be insufficient since these municipalities account for just 37% of the current deforestation rate. This strategy may also be undermined by the leakage of deforestation actions to unmonitored municipalities. Using a set of spatially explicit datasets integrated into a deforestation‐prediction modeling approach, we propose a science‐based alternative method for ranking deforestation hotspots to be prioritized by law enforcement actions. Our prioritization method accounts for more than 60% of the deforestation, detecting larger deforested areas in both private and public lands, while covering 27% less territory than "Plano Amazônia 21/22." Optimizing the detection of priority areas for curbing deforestation, as proposed here, is the first step to reducing deforestation rates and comply with the Brazilian legal commitment of 3925 km2 year−1. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aim: The aim was to evaluate fire activity for the entire Amazon and Amazon regions within each country/department from 2003 to 2020, assessing the potential contributions of drought and deforestation and contrasting 2020 with the previous years. Location: Amazonia sensu lato. Time period: Annually from 2003 to 2020. Major taxa studied: Terrestrial plants. Methods: We collected time series of MODIS active fire detections and burned area and assessed the yearly burned area of several land‐use/land‐cover types. We also divided the Amazon territory into 10 km × 10 km grid cells to identify annual anomalies in active fire occurrence, rainfall, maximum cumulative water deficit (MCWD) and deforestation. Rainfall and MCWD anomalies for a given cell each year consisted of annual values at least one standard deviation below average for that cell from 2003 to 2020, whereas fire and deforestation anomalies had annual values at least one standard deviation above the average for that cell. Results: Brazil and Bolivia have contributed, on average, >70% and about 15%, respectively, of annual active fire detections in the Amazon, in addition to more than half and about one‐third of annual burned areas in the region. On average, 32% of annual burned areas in the Amazon have consisted of agricultural lands, 29% of natural grasslands and 16% of old‐growth forests. The annual extent of areas with fire anomalies was significantly associated with the annual extent of areas with deforestation anomalies, but not significantly associated with the annual extent of areas experiencing water deficit anomalies. In 2020, the total burned area in the Amazon was the greatest since 2010, and the ratio of burned area per active fire was the second greatest of the time series, despite a much lower extent of areas with anomalously high water deficit in comparison to the 2015–2016 megadrought. Main conclusions Our findings suggest that the majority of anomalously high fire occurrences in the Amazon since 2003 did not occur in anomalous drought conditions. The intensification of agricultural fires and deforestation aggravated the burning of Amazonian ecosystems in 2020. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]