Posted for Anna Barnett

They sent in police. They seized illegally grazing cattle. In an environmentally friendly credit crunch, they cut bank loans to farmers who don’t comply with environmental regulations.

But despite Brazil’s war on deforestation, the media is reporting that losses of Amazon rainforest are slightly up this year compared with 2006-2007. There is a caveat to this: AP notes that the apparent rise falls within the satellite survey’s margin of error.

This is a reversal after three years of steady rainforest recovery – the BBC headline a year ago was ‘Brazil deforestation slows again’ – but it is no surprise. In that BBC story, Greenpeace was already warning that clearcuts had spiked since the end of the last report period, July 2007. Official numbers confirmed the trend in January, and the police inspections and policy crackdowns were rolled out.

Environment minister Marina Silva resigned in May, saying the government was resisting her efforts to save the trees.

A ministry report after she left fingered a separate government department as the biggest bad guy in Brazilian deforestation.

So Silva’s replacement, Carlos Minc, is sighing with relief that this year’s numbers aren’t far worse. In total 12,000 square kilometers of rainforest were lost from August 2007 to July 2008, a 3.8% rise from last year. That’s within the margin of error of the estimate, according to Brazil’s National Space Research Institute, the source of the data (AP).

“Many had expected an increase of 30-40 percent and we managed to stabilize it,” Minc told a press conference (Reuters).

Still, the country has got a long way to go toward the goal set this fall of completely halting deforestation – and the biodiversity losses and greenhouse emissions that follow the chopped trees – by 2015.

Expect Brazil’s plans for avoiding emissions from deforestation, and its pleas for the industrialized nations to fund those plans, to make an appearance sometime during the UN climate meeting in Poznan this month.

See also

Brazil goes to war against logging

Image: satellite data collected in 2000 and 2001 classify the Amazon into three separate land categories: forest shows red, grasses green, and bare ground blue / image by Robert Simmon, based on data provided by the University of Maryland’s Global Land Cover Facility via NASA Visible Earth