By IPAM's communications office
The Cerrado has lost 29 million hectares of native vegetation in the last 34 years, a third of all deforestation in Brazil during that period. As a result, the biome now has 56% of its area covered by native vegetation and 40% dedicated to agricultural activities.
This information is part of MapBiomas, an initiative that maps all of Brazil's biomes. The data is available for free on the platform. mapbiomas.org and were presented at the 9th Meeting and Fair of the Peoples of the Cerrado, which takes place until Saturday in Brasília.
“The Cerrado is the most central and strategic biome in Brazil, the second largest in South America, and the most biodiverse savanna in the world. And yet, it is the most threatened biome in Brazil,” said Ane Alencar, Science Director of IPAM (Amazon Environmental Research Institute). IPAM is the organization responsible for mapping the native vegetation cover of the Cerrado within MapBiomas.
At the event, Alencar also demonstrated the new tool. MapBiomas Alert, which monitors recent deforestation and generates reports with high-resolution images, which are automatically made available to enforcement agencies such as Ibama and the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office (MPF), as well as to the general public on the website alerta.mapbiomas.org.
According to this system, which is already in operation, 95% of the deforestation that occurred in the first three months of 2019 in the Cerrado was illegal. "The difficulty in combating illegal deforestation in Brazil is no longer a technological problem," stated Alencar.
Guilherme Eidt, legal advisor for ISPN (Institute for Society, Population and Nature), emphasized the opportunities that MapBiomas Alerta provides to traditional peoples in defending their territories. “It’s an opportunity to act in combating illegal deforestation in the Cerrado from the perspectives of local communities,” explains Eidt. “Anyone who sees deforestation in the field can go to the MapBiomas Alerta website, print the related report, and file a lawsuit with the Federal Public Prosecutor's Office, for example.”
MapBiomas is a multi-institutional initiative involving NGOs, universities, and technology companies dedicated to mapping changes in land cover and land use in Brazilian biomes to support and promote sustainable management and conservation of the country's natural resources. IPAM coordinates the mapping of the Cerrado biome.