Brazil announces plan to slash rainforest destruction

The Brazilian government yesterday announced a 10-year plan to slash rainforest destruction by 70% days after new figures showed Amazon deforestation was again on the rise.

Officials said the targets, which are part of Brazil's Climate Change Plan, were the first time the Brazilian government had set specific goals for deforestation reduction.

The plan outlines a 40% reduction of deforestation until 2009, a 30% reduction between 2010 and 2013 and a further 30% cut between 2014 and 2017.

"The target is that in 2017 deforestation will be [reduced to] 5,000 sq km," environment minister Carlos Minc told reporters in Brazil's capital, Brasilia.

He said the slowdown in deforestation would mean a 72% reduction in climate changing carbon emissions. That, he added, "is an even more daring target than in England which aims for an 80% reduction but [not] until 2050."

The blueprint for deforestation reduction makes it clear that hitting the targets depends on Brazil's ability to raise funds for its fight against the loggers.

In August 2008 Brazil's government created the Amazon Fund, a mechanism for foreign governments to help pay for the protection of the world's largest tropical rainforest and combat global warming. In September Norway's government became the first to contribute to the fund, pledging $1bn (£668m).

Mr Minc said he hoped for donations of $1bn a year, in order to bankroll Brazil's campaign against deforestation.

The plans follow the release of government figures on Friday showing that deforestation rose 3.8% in the year leading up to July 2008 – the first annual increase in three years.

Satellite images captured by Brazil's Space Research Institute, Inpe, showed that 11,968 sq km of forest were cleared until July this year, up from 11,532 sq km the previous year.

Mr Minc said the rise would have been even greater had it not been for an anti-deforestation drive launched at the start of 2008. Deforestation levels had fallen in the 36 regions that suffered most deforestation in 2007 as a result of the crackdown, he said.

Known as the Arc of Fire, the crackdown has triggered violent uprisings in several Amazon towns where the economies, dependent on logging, have been badly hit.

Speaking to the Guardian earlier this year Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Brazil's minister for strategic affairs and the coordinator of its Amazon development plan, said his country needed to embark on a "revolutionary" project for the Amazon.

"We cannot preserve the Amazon without a project of development otherwise we are just playing with words," he said.

Without offering economic alternatives to logging it would be impossible to effectively combat illegal logging, he said.

"I have heard from a few foreigners the idea that the Brazilian state should actually transport the 27 million Brazilians out of the Amazon but our country is not governed by Stalin and we will not do that," he said.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2008/dec/02/forests-brazil