After 2023 highs, Cerrado deforestation drops in January

For most of 2023, the Brazilian government boasted stellar deforestation numbers … for the Amazon. The rate of destruction of the rainforest was cut in half last year, as the Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva administration worked to restore the country’s ability to enforce environmental laws.

But the results for other biomes were much less glowing — and that was especially true for the Cerrado savanna, which became the country’s deforestation hotspot. In 2023, deforestation in the biome increased by 43 percent.

In January of this year, however, deforestation figures for the Cerrado were much more encouraging than in previous months, dropping 48 percent from December according to data released Thursday by the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), an environmental NGO.

But optimism should be taken with a grain of salt. The figure was the lowest in the last 11 months, but still 10 percent higher than in January 2023.

In the first month of the year, 51,000 hectares were deforested. To put this in perspective, this area is roughly three times the size of Washington D.C.

Moreover, it remains unclear whether the reduction is a byproduct of government action. Or if it happened at all. “We are going through the rainy season in the biome, which makes it difficult [for satellites] to...