As climate change wreaks increasingly devastating droughts, hurricanes and storms, preserving the world’s remaining large blocks of standing forest has become a matter of survival. However, 47 million hectares (116 million acres) of forest in the Brazilian Amazon, an area nearly the size of Cameroon, remain unprotected. These are unallocated public lands, which aren’t designated as conservation units or intended for traditional populations like Indigenous peoples or Quilombolas, Afro-Brazilian communities established by formerly enslaved people. “It’s a huge area without designation, which makes land grabbers or even politicians interpret it as no-man’s land,” Paulo Moutinho, senior researcher at the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM), told Mongabay. According to Brazil’s space agency, INPE, from August 2021 to July 2022, 28% of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon occurred in unallocated public lands. Even in 2023, when deforestation rates plummeted by half across the rainforest, these areas saw an increase of more than 30% in clearing, according to IPAM. At the current pace of destruction, billions of tons of carbon dioxide could be released into the atmosphere, threatening the fight against global warming and the water supply in Brazil, which faced its worst drought ever recorded in 2024. “We’re going to create a hole in the flying rivers,” Moutinho said, referring to the wind flows that take moisture from the Atlantic Ocean and the Amazon out to the rest of the country, securing water for agriculture, human consumption and energy generation. “The destination of this enormous forest mass is almost a question of…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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South Africa Today – Environment
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