Good governance saves Amazon forest

BRAZIL: Deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon rainforest has dropped almost by half thanks to more governance in the region, Reinaldo Lourival from the non-governmental organization The Nature Conservancy (TNC) said Tuesday.

Statistics released Monday by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research (INPE) show that the deforested area registered by the Real-Time Deforestation Detection System (DETER) from August 2009 to June 2010 fell by 49 percent, compared with the same period a year ago.

Lourival, the coordinator of the conservation program in Brazil’s Amazon region, observed several reasons for the remarkable drop.

“First is the strengthened governance in the Amazon, with dramatic changes in the governmental command and control structures,” he told Xinhua in an interview.

In addition, the ecological awareness of consumers and organized societies are also developing and exerting more “pressure over large agribusiness corporations in order to guarantee environmental accountability of their production chains,” he said.

“There is a slow change in the attitude of agricultural sectors, featured by more awareness of legal responsibilities and role,” Lourival said.

Despite the downward trend of deforestation in the Amazon region indicated by DETER, the magnitude of the reduction will be assessed more widely with data from another system of INPE, the Project for Monitoring Deforestation in the Amazon (PRODES), which calculates the annual consolidated rate and will be released in November.

“They are complementary, providing answers to two types of question,” Lourival said. “While DETER answers ‘where’ and ‘when,’ providing support to enforcement and field operations, PRODES deals with ‘how much,’ offering data on annual deforestation rates and quantities in the long term that account for all years of monitoring in Brazil.”

BRASILIA, Wednesday, Xinhua