Highways Paving Over Brazil's Amazon Rainforest

MANAUS, Brazil, May 25, 2004 (ENS) - A new study by a team of U.S. and Brazilian scientists shows that the rate of forest destruction has accelerated in the Brazilian Amazon since 1990.

"The recent deforestation numbers are just plain scary," said the study's lead author William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute, who operates out of a research facility in Manaus. "During the last two years nearly 12 million acres of rainforest have been destroyed - that is equivalent to about 11 football fields a minute."

The team says the Amazonian deforestation will likely continue to increase unless the Brazilian government alters its aggressive plans for highway and infrastructure expansion. The study was published in the May 21 issue of the journal "Science," a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

The researchers report deforestation has risen most sharply in the southern and eastern parts of the Amazon, where rainforests are more seasonal and thus more easily burned.

The 2002-2003 deforestation rate reached 23,750 square kilometers (9,169 square miles), the second highest rate in Amazonia´s recorded history.

Farms cleared from the Amazon rainforest spread out on either side of a narrow dirt road. The river, a tributary of the Amazon, is colored brown by the sediment it carries, the result of deforestation upstream. (Photo courtesy NASA)

The rising deforestation is directly linked to Brazilian development policies, the researchers say.

In 2000, Brazil announced the largest infrastructure expansion plan in the history of the Amazon. The plan could ultimately involve more than $40 billion in investments in new highways, roads, power lines, gas lines, hydroelectric reservoirs, railroads, and river channelization projects.

These huge projects will criss-cross the Amazon Basin, say the team members, providing greatly increased access for loggers and colonists to pristine tracts of forest.

"In the past, such projects have led to striking increases in illegal deforestation, logging, mining, and hunting activities," said Heraldo Vasconcelos of the Federal University of Uberlândia in Brazil, another co-author of the study.

The key drivers of increasing Amazon forest loss, say the authors, are rising deforestation and land speculation along new highways and planned highway routes, and the dramatic growth of Amazonian cattle ranching and industrial soybean farming.

"Soybean farms cause some forest clearing directly," said co-author Philip Fearnside of Brazil's National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus. "But they have a much greater impact on deforestation by consuming cleared land, savanna, and transitional forests, thereby pushing ranchers and slash-and-burn farmers ever deeper into the forest frontier."

"Soybean farming also provides a key economic and political impetus for new highways and infrastructure projects, which accelerate deforestation by other actors," Fearnside said.

The Brazilian Environment Minister Marina Silva has announced some initiatives designed to slow Amazon forest loss, including increased satellite monitoring of deforestation, and the involvement of additional government ministries - not just the Ministry of Environment - in efforts to reduce illegal deforestation and forest burning.

A highway cuts across the Amazon Basin, bisecting virgin rainforest. (Photo courtesy Dr. Anna Ross/Christian Brothers University)

"If Brazil does not curtail the expansion of new highways and transportation projects, the net result will not only be further increases in Amazon forest destruction, but fragmentation of the surviving forests on an unprecedented spatial scale," Laurance warned.

The government is making an effort to achieve sustainable forest management in some areas. On Thursday, IBAMA Executive Director Paulo Maier told a seminar on planning for the Tapajos National Forest that there would be collaboration between the government environment agency and local communities.

Project coordinator Angelo Francisco, the seminar’s objective was reached through discussion of park management with community representatives. He will direct the form in which natural resources will be used in the Tapajos National Forest with respect to timber, wild animals and fishing resources, with the goal of generating employment and income for the families that habitat the Conservation Unit.

The Tapajos National Forest, located in the west of Para State, is the only one in Brazil that has a forest management program for sustainable production of industrialized timber. This project was started in 1999 with financial support from the International Organization of Tropical Timber (ITTO) and is intended to serve as a forestry management model for other national forests in Amazonia.

Inside the Tapajos Flona, which covers 600,000 hectares, research projects on climate change are being conducted by three research institutions including the Federal University of Para Emilio Goeldi Museum.