About 1,123 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest were devastated in April, up from 145 square kilometers in March, the Brazilian National Space Research Institute (Inpe) said in a report Monday.
The deforested area is almost as large as the city of Rio de Janeiro, which has an area of 1,182 square kilometers, the report said.
The report showed that 794.1 square kilometers of the deforested land, which represents 70 percent of the total, were in Brazil's midwestern state of Mato Grosso.
Brazil's northern state of Roraima ranked second with 248.8 square km of deforested land, and the state of Rondonia, also in the northern region, was third with 34.6 square kilometers, the report said.
The state of Amazonas, the largest in Brazil, has the lowest deforestation rate with 8.4 square kilometers, the report added.
The results registered in April show the rising tendency of deforestation in the region, the report said, adding that there were 639 square kilometers of deforested land in January and 724 square kilometers in February.
The Brazilian Amazon has a total rainforest area of about 4 million square kilometers. Over the past 20 years, since Inpe started to monitor deforestation via satellites, 700,000 square kmhave been destroyed, an area equal to a soccer field being cleared every 10 seconds in the region.
http://news.xinhuanet.com/english/2008-06/03/content_8305060.htm
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