Nearly 8,000sq kms lost in the year to July amid alarm new president Jair Bolsonaro will make situation worse 
 
 Brazil has released its worst annual deforestation figures in a decade amid fears that the situation might worsen when the avowedly anti-environmentalist president-elect Jair Bolsonaro takes power. 
 
 Between August 2017 and July 2018, 7,900sq kms were deforested, according to preliminary figures from the environment ministry based on satellite monitoring – a 13.7% rise on the previous year and the biggest area of forest cleared since 2008. The area is equivalent to 987,000 football pitches. 
 
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 The news was met by dismay from environmentalists who warned deforestation was likely to become more acute when Bolsonaro becomes president on 1 January. 
 
 “It is a lot of destroyed forest,” said Marcio Astrini, Greenpeace Brasil’s public policy coordinator. “The situation is very worrying… what is bad will get worse.” 
 
 The environment ministry said the increase came despite an increase in its budget and in operations carried out by its environment agency Ibama. 
 
 “We need to increase the mobilisation at all levels of government, of society, and of the productive sector to combat illicit environmental activities,” environment minister Edson Duarte said in a statement. 
 
 But the government appears to be heading in the other direction. 
 
 After falling for several years, deforestation began rising again in 2013, the year after leftist president Dilma Rousseff approved a new forest code which gave an amnesty to those deforesting on small properties. Deforestation has risen in four of the six years since then, including in 2016, the year Rousseff was impeached and replaced by her former vice-president Michel Temer. 
 
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 Temer has made further concessions to powerful agribusiness interests in return for support from its congressional representatives – including approving a measure that legalised land that had been squatted in the Amazon, a common deforestation driver. Last year Temer backed down on measures to reduce protection to a national forest called Jamanxim and a protected area called Renca after protests from environmentalists, supermodel Gisele Bündchen and even singer Alicia Keys at the Rock in Rio music festival. 
 
 Moves like these signalled the Brazilian congress was no longer concerned about deforestation, said Astrini, encouraging deforestation. 
 
 “We feel in our field work that these deforestation gangs are very confident they will get amnesty or that they are covered,” he said. 
 
 As more and more of the Amazon is cut down, the world’s greatest forest is now getting close to the “tipping point” – after which experts fear it could disappear. 
 
 “A moment will arrive in which the accumulation of this deforestation will cause an effect in which the forest will stop being a forest,” Astrini said. “The scientists calculate this is between 20-30%. We are very close to the 20%.” 
 
 The Climate Observatory (Observatório do Clima) – a non-profit, climate change network – calculated that in 2017, 46% of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions were due to deforestation. 
 
 It also expects deforestation to worsen once Jair Bolsonaro’s new government begins. He has frequently attacked what he calls the “fines industry” of agencies such as Ibama, and wants to allow mining in protected indigenous reserves – some of the Amazon’s least-destroyed forests – and even considered making the environment ministry part of the agriculture ministry. 
 
 Bolsonaro has enjoyed support from agribusiness and his minister of agriculture will be headed up by Tereza Cristina, head of its Congress lobby. 
 
 His foreign minister, Ernesto Araújo, has argued that global warming is a Marxist plot. On Friday, his vice-president elect, General Hamilton Mourão, while admitting global warming did exist, told the Folha de S.Paulo newspaper: “Environmentalism is used as an instrument of domination by big economies.” 
 
 Bolsonaro only backed down on plans to withdraw Brazil from the Paris climate deal because agricultural producers argued the move risked boycotts from European consumers, local media reported. 
 
 “If the problem is in politics and politicians and their power of decision, they need to be pressured,” Astrini said. ||||| Image copyright AFP/Getty Image caption The government blamed illegal logging for the rise 
 
 Deforestation of the Amazon rainforest in Brazil has hit its highest rate in a decade, according to official data. 
 
 About 7,900 sq km (3,050 sq miles) of the world's largest rainforest was destroyed between August 2017 and July 2018 - an area roughly five times the size of London. 
 
 Environment Minister Edson Duarte said illegal logging was to blame. 
 
 The figures come amid concerns about the policies of Brazil's newly elected president, Jair Bolsonaro. 
 
 During the 2018 election campaign, Mr Bolsonaro pledged to limit fines for damaging forestry and to weaken the influence of the environmental agency. 
 
 An aide for the president-elect has also announced the administration will merge the agriculture and environment ministries, which critics say could endanger the rainforest. 
 
 The latest government data says most of the deforestation occurred in the states of Mato Grosso and Pará, and marked a 13.7% rise over last year's figures. 
 
 Mato Grosso is the top producer of grains in Brazil, and critics say expanding agriculture is also encroaching on the rainforest. 
 
 Mr Duarte blamed "an upsurge in organised crime" for the illegal deforestation, and said the country must broaden the fight against "environmental violations and in defence of sustainable development of the biome". 
 
 Image copyright Getty Images Image caption The Amazon is sometimes called the lungs of the planet 
 
 Satellite data from the deforestation monitoring project known as Prodes informed the annual survey. 
 
 While the rate does mark a significant rise from last year, when the rate of deforestation dropped 16% in a 12-month period, it still marks a 72% drop from 2004, when the Brazilian federal government launched measures to combat deforestation. 
 
 In that year, an area the size of Haiti - more than 27,000 sq km - was cleared from the rainforest. 
 
 The Amazon region holds the largest tropical rainforest in the world and is home to plant and animal species that are still being discovered by scientists. 
 
 Most of its millions of square kilometres are inside Brazil, where under laws dating back to 1965, landowners must keep a percentage of their property forested. ||||| Brazil's government reported Thursday that annual destruction of its Amazon rainforest jumped by 28 percent after four straight years of declines, an increase activists said was linked to recent loosening of the nation's environmental law meant to protect the jungle. 
 
 Brazil's Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira gives a press conference on deforestation in the Amazon in Brasilia, Brazil, Thursday, Nov. 14, 2013. Brazil's government says destruction of its Amazon... (Associated Press) 
 
 FILE - This Sept. 15, 2009 file photo shows a deforested area near Novo Progresso in Brazil's northern state of Para. Brazil's government says destruction of its Amazon rainforest has jumped by 28 percent.... (Associated Press) 
 
 However, the destruction was still the second-lowest amount of jungle destroyed since Brazil began tracking deforestation in 1988. 
 
 The increase in deforestation came in the August 2012 through July 2013 period, the time when Brazil annually measures the destruction of the forest by studying satellite images. The country registered its lowest level of Amazon felling the year before. 
 
 The Amazon rainforest is considered one of the world's most important natural defenses against global warming because of its capacity to absorb huge amounts of carbon dioxide. About 75 percent of Brazil's emissions come from rainforest clearing, as vegetation burns and felled trees rot. 
 
 That releases an estimated 400 million tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every year, making Brazil at least the sixth-biggest emitter of the gas. 
 
 Environment Minister Izabella Teixeira said Thursday that the most recent figures show 2,256 square miles (5,843 square kilometers) of rainforest were felled. That's compared to the 1,765 square miles (1,571 square kilometers) cleared the previous year. 
 
 Environmentalists blame the increase on a loosening of Brazil's environmental laws. They also say that the government's push for big infrastructure projects like dams, roads and railways is pushing deforestation. 
 
 A bill revising the Forest Code law passed Congress last year after more than a decade of efforts by Brazil's powerful agricultural lobby to make changes to what has been one of the world's toughest environmental laws, at least on paper. 
 
 The changes mostly eased restrictions for landowners with smaller properties, allowing them to clear land closer to riverbanks and other measures. Perhaps the most controversial portion of the new law was what activists say was an amnesty, allowing those who illegally felled land to not face penalties if they signed an agreement to replant trees, which many environmentalists question could be enforced. 
 
 Paulo Adario, coordinator of Greenpeace's Amazon campaign, said that it was scandalous that there was such a spike in the destruction. 
 
 "The government can't be surprised by this increase in deforestation, given that their own action is what's pushing it," he said. "The change in the Forest Code and the resulting amnesty for those who illegally felled the forest sent the message that such crimes have no consequences." 
 
 Adario also said the Rousseff government's strong push for infrastructure projects in the Amazon region was leading to increased deforestation, and Thursday's government report showed that much of the destruction was centered along a government-improved roadway running through the states of Para and Mato Grosso. 
 
 Better roads make it easier to illegally extract timber from the jungle and push more soy farmers and ranchers, who clear trees so they can work land and plant pasture, into previously untouched areas. 
 
 ___ 
 
 Associated Press writer Brad Brooks contributed to this report from Rio de Janeiro. ||||| The president-elect of Brazil has big plans for the Amazon rainforest. 
 
 He wants to carve more mines and pave new roads. He wants fewer penalties for cutting down trees, and he has promised to halt growth of a network of indigenous forest reserves. By merging the nation's agriculture and environment ministries, he hopes to make it easier for Brazil's powerful soy and cattle industries to transform more native jungle into pasture and farms. 
 
 When Jair Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old retired Brazilian military officer, takes the helm in January of a country that manages 1.5 million square miles of the Amazon, the risks to wildlife and indigenous tribal communities will be clear. If Bolsonaro follows through on his campaign promises, deforestation rates in Brazil could almost immediately triple, according to an assessment by scientists. 
 
 View Images Bolsonaro, leader of the right-wing Social Liberal Party, stands before the Brazilian flag on election day. Photograph by Mauro Pimentel, AFP/Getty Images 
 
 But the consequences of Bolsonaro's policies also would be felt far beyond areas hit by chainsaws. Even modest increases in deforestation could affect water supplies in Brazilian cities and in neighboring countries while harming the very farms he is trying to expand. More massive deforestation might alter water supplies as far away as Africa or California. 
 
 Most troubling of all: Some scientists suggest the Amazon may already be nearing a tipping point. The region has been so degraded that even a small uptick in deforestation could send the forest hurtling toward a transition to something resembling a woodland savanna, according to an analysis earlier this year by two top scientists. In addition to forever destroying huge sections of the world's largest rainforest, that shift would release tremendous quantities of planet-warming greenhouse gases, which could hasten the decline of whatever forest remained. 
 
 "We are already in a very critical situation in terms of climate change," says Adriane Esquivel-Muelbert, a native Brazilian who studies tropical forests at the University of Leeds in the United Kingdom. She's the lead author on a study published this month showing that the mix of tree species across the forest is already shifting in response to rising temperatures. 
 
 "If we mess up with the Amazon, carbon dioxide emissions will increase so massively that everyone will suffer," she adds. 
 
 By some accounts, it could happen quite fast. 
 
 The rainforest creates rain 
 
 Bolsonaro, a right-wing congressman from Rio de Janeiro, soundly defeated a former mayor of Sao Paulo in Brazil's presidential election late last month. The populist president-elect is so openly hostile to his country's established order that some call him "Tropical Trump." 
 
 His rise comes at a perilous moment for the Amazon. 
 
 From poison dart frogs and giant anteaters to golden lion tamarins and stinging bullet ants, the South American rainforest is the most species-rich biome on Earth, with more diverse plant life in a single acre than may be found in many American states. It is home to 10 percent of the world's species, including 2.5 million species of insect. 
 
 The forest also influences the water cycle on a regional and perhaps even global scale. As moisture comes off the Atlantic Ocean it falls on the forest as rain. This water gets sucked up by deep roots, then moves through plants and across the surface of leaves before returning to the atmosphere. Winds blowing over the uneven forest canopy create turbulence, which allows the atmosphere to absorb more moisture. 
 
 All this water then moves like a giant flowing river in the sky, falling as rain and then evaporating again and again until it reaches the Andes. Ultimately, the forest produces at least half of its own rain. 
 
 "One water vapor molecule may be recycled five to seven times before it leaves the system, either through the atmosphere or the Amazon River," says Carlos Nobre, a climate scientist with the University of Sao Paulo's Institute for Advanced Studies. 
 
 But experts increasingly fear this delicate exchange could collapse. The loss of just a fraction more of this moisture-creating forest could lead far more of it to dry out, which would reduce rainfall even more, in a self-reinforcing spiral. Already, climate change, decades of logging, and land-clearing by intentionally set wildfires have sparked record-setting droughts in 2005, 2010, and 2015-2016. 
 
 "That suggests the system is flickering," says Thomas Lovejoy, a George Mason University professor and senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, who is widely considered the godfather of biodiversity studies. 
 
 Lovejoy and Nobre recently tried to estimate how close to the edge the Amazon really is. Their projection, published earlier this year as an editorial in Science Advances, suggests that in the most susceptible parts of the rainforest—the southern, eastern and central Amazon—loss of as little as 20 to 25 percent of original forestland could tip the system into an unstoppable transition to a drier, savanna-like ecosystem. 
 
 Already, by the Brazilian government's own estimates, 17 percent of the Amazon forest system has been lost—not including the parts that are still largely intact, but degraded. 
 
 How likely is the scenario Lovejoy describes? 
 
 "It's not something we know with any confidence, but it's a possibility—and not just a crazy, harebrained possibility. It's a very real one," says Abigail L. S. Swann, a University of Washington eco-climatologist who is contributing to a chapter on abrupt landscape changes for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's next assessment. 
 
 While no one knows precisely where the Amazon’s tipping point may lie, "it makes no sense at all to discover the tipping point by actually tipping over it," Lovejoy says. 
 
 The forest is changing already 
 
 Even as Bolsonaro prepares to take office, the Amazon is already changing. 
 
 The dry season is lengthening and rainfall has dropped by a quarter in some regions. Meanwhile, precipitation, when it comes, sometimes arrives in more intense bursts, leading to massive floods in 2009, 2012, and 2014. The region's climate system is oscillating more wildly. 
 
 In the study she led, published in the journal Global Change Biology with more than a hundred other scientists as co-authors, Esquivel-Muelbert found that during the past 30 years, more drought-tolerant plant species have appeared in the Amazon, while species that predominantly emerge in wet areas are declining. Fast-growing trees and taller trees that are better at accessing the sun are outcompeting shorter, damp-loving species. 
 
 Another study shows the rate of tree deaths is increasing. 
 
 It's not clear whether all this is the beginning of the shift Lovejoy and Nobre predicted—or something else. "But it's still important because the species are beginning to change, and that can change how the forest behaves," Esquivel-Muelbert says. 
 
 How will that change the interactions among tens of thousands of species within the jungle? No one yet knows. 
 
 "It's sending ripples through the system, and we have no idea where they are going to lead," Lovejoy says. "It could become a much simpler ecosystem, and what that means in terms of its overall stability is a real question." 
 
 If Lovejoy is right, and heat and deforestation lead to less rain and a transition to a different type of landscape, consequences will be felt far and wide. 
 
 Expanding ripples 
 
 For starters, it's impossible to quantify the true value of lost diversity. In one recent review, a team found evidence that 381 new types of plants or animals had been discovered in the Amazon during a single two-year period from 2014 to 2015—the equivalent of one new species every other day. 
 
 "It's kind of a cliché that the cure for cancer might be in the Amazon, but it's also kind of true," Esquivel-Muelbert says. 
 
 Moisture from the Amazon also nourishes the winter rains that supply Uruguay, northern Argentina and Paraguay with water. The recent drought that led to water shortages in São Paulo, Brazil’s largest city, were likely exacerbated by rainforest shifts. 
 
 In some places, rainfall in the Amazon also helps supply water to the very soy farmers and beef ranchers who are clearing the forest. Brazilian agriculture, it seems, actually needs the Amazon. 
 
 "We need to have forest in order to have the rain necessary to plant crops," Esquivel-Muelbert says. 
 
 Massive deforestation of the Amazon could change weather outside South America as well. Because water vapor heats the air as it condenses high in the sky to form liquid raindrops, a significant reduction in rain caused by deforestation would actually cool the atmosphere above the region. That cooling perturbation would leave the southern hemisphere in atmospheric waves—generating untold ripple effects around the planet. 
 
 According to one modeling study , for example, if the Amazon were ever completely deforested, the snowpack in the Sierra Nevada mountains—a crucial water reservoir for California—would be diminished by half. 
 
 That’s without even considering the effect on CO2 and climate. 
 
 Burning time 
 
 "The Amazon stores a tremendous amount of carbon," Nobre says. 
 
 Instead of sucking CO2 from the sky, a deforested Amazon could instead begin releasing stored greenhouse gases. If 60 percent of the forest were to degrade to a savanna, Nobre says, that could unleash the equivalent of five or six years’ worth of global fossil-fuel emissions. 
 
 Michael Mann, a climate scientist and director of the Earth System Science Center at Pennsylvania State University, called it "another aggravating climate feedback" loop, where drying rainforest leads to less absorption of CO2, which in turn promotes more climate change, drying more forest. 
 
 "We depend quite a bit on the continued functioning of key carbon sinks," he says. "That’s just one of the many things that makes climate change a global problem." 
 
 In fact, deforestation, fire, and climate change already work synergistically in the Amazon. In recent years, climate change has sparked droughts that let wildfires burn bigger and longer. Between 2003 and 2013, forest clearing dropped by 76 percent, but the increase in wildfire, especially during the drought of 2015, erased half the increased absorption of CO2. 
 
 That's why Lovejoy and Nobre conclude that—contrary to Bolsonaro's campaign promise—what the Amazon needs is not deforestation, but a massive campaign of tree planting. 
 
 "It really makes sense to do some active reforestation to build that margin of safety," Lovejoy says. "It doesn't have to be the forest primeval, but you need something with trees and relatively complex communities." ||||| In the late 20th and early 21st century, Brazil set policies that made it a world leader in reducing deforestation, helping safeguard the Amazon. 
 
 However, the gains made over those years are now at risk due to the proposed environmental policies of far-right candidate Jair Bolsonaro, who analysts say is highly likely to become Brazil’s president in a runoff election on 28 October. 
 
 Bolsonaro has pledged to shut down Brazil’s environmental ministry, relax environmental law enforcement and licensing, open indigenous reserves to mining, ban international environmental NGOs such as Greenpeace and WWF from the country, and back out of the Paris climate accord. 
 
 A study by this commentary’s authors estimates that Brazilian deforestation and carbon emissions under Bolsonaro’s policies would cause unprecedented Amazon forest loss, and contribute to destabilizing the global climate. This post is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily Mongabay. 
 
 It was almost too good to be true. In the late 20th and early 21st century, Brazil’s Amazon forest was disappearing at a rapid rate (27,772 square kilometers or 10,723 square miles per year in 2004), making the country the worldwide leader in deforestation and a major emitter of greenhouse gases (GHG). Then, starting in 2005, annual deforestation rates began to decrease at a breathtaking speed, dropping to 4,575 square kilometers (1,766 square miles) in 2012, a historical low, and a fall of more than 83 percent in just eight years. 
 
 This caused the country’s carbon emissions due to land use change to fall sharply, by 63 percent from 2005 to 2012. Building on these successes, the Brazilian government pledged an ambitious reduction of its GHG emissions – 37 percent by 2025, and 43 percent by 2030, below 2005 levels – a promise made at the 21st Conference of the Parties (COP21) in Paris in December, 2015. 
 
 There are several plausible causes behind the sudden decrease in deforestation rates in the Brazilian Amazon, including the expansion of protected areas and indigenous lands, better enforcement of existing environmental legislation, interventions in supply chains and credit restrictions, and fines and embargoes of illegal deforesters. 
 
 While praised by many inside and outside the government, the durability of this achievement is uncertain, given increasing demand for Brazil’s agricultural commodities worldwide, large-scale transportation and energy infrastructure projects (including Amazon dams, roads and railways), and political upheaval. 
 
 Today, in the midst of an unprecedented economic crisis and political unrest, environmental protections are in danger of being rolled back. The annual deforestation rate in the world’s largest rainforest has been steadily growing since 2012. 
 
 But the worst is likely yet to come. Jair Bolsonaro, the far-right candidate who is poised to become Brazil’s next president after taking a near-majority in a first round vote, has promised that, if elected, he would shut down Brazil’s environmental ministry, relax environmental law enforcement and licensing, open indigenous reserves to mining, and back out of the Paris climate accord. Moreover, international NGOs, such as Greenpeace and WWF, would be banned from the country. 
 
 The damage these policies could do is extreme. Based on an economic modeling approach that simulates the competition for land in order to meet a growing global demand for major commodities such as beef and soybeans, we estimate that, if environmental protections are removed by Brazil’s next president, the average annual loss of primary forest in the Amazon will quickly rise to 25,600 square kilometers (9,884 square miles) per year, a figure similar to the deforestation rates measured at the beginning of the 2000s and an increase of 268 percent from 2017. 
 
 Within a decade, the scale of deforestation would be equivalent to the area of the UK or the US state of Oregon. Moreover, 18 percent of this deforestation (46,300 square kilometers or 17,877 square miles) would occur inside protected areas, including national parks and indigenous reserves. 
 
 Carbon emissions would rise as deforestation increases. Under Bolsonaro’s proposed policies, from 2021 to 2030, accumulated emissions from clear cutting Amazon forest would attain 13.12 gigatons of carbon dioxide equivalent (GtCO2e), or an average of 1.31 GtCO2e per year, making it all but impossible for Brazil to fulfill its international commitments made in Paris. This annual carbon release corresponds to 3 percent of the current global emissions. Moreover, according to the latest literature 13.12 GtCO2e could represent up to 20 percent of the “free” carbon budget remaining to achieve the 1.5 Celsius IPCC goal. Carbon dioxide equivalent (CO2e) is a measure used to compare the emissions from various greenhouse gases based upon their global warming potential. 
 
 In this election, and in the coming years, political will is needed to ensure that the Amazon forest and the ecosystem services it provides are conserved. The loss of biodiversity and climate regulation that could result from a dramatic change in policies would be a tipping point for both biodiversity and climate change, with global consequences. 
 
 Authors: Aline C. Soterroni, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, Brazil, and International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (soterr@iiasa.ac.at); Fernando M. Ramos, National Institute for Space Research, São José dos Campos, Brazil (fernando.ramos@inpe.br); Michael Obersteiner, International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria (oberstei@iiasa.ac.at); and Stephen Polasky, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, MN, USA. (polasky@umn.edu). 
 
 Correction: The accumulated deforestation chart that appeared in the original version of this story has been updated to more effectively show the true progression of deforestation, and future projections, in the 21st century. 
 
 Citations: 
 
 Soterroni et al., Environmental Research Letters 13 (7) 1–12 (2018). http://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/aaccbb/pdf 
 
 Jason A. Lowe, Daniel Bernie, The impact of Earth system feedbacks on carbon budgets and climate response. Phil. Trans. R. Soc. A 376 20170263 (2018). http://rsta.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/376/2119/20170263 
 
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– Think deforestation is declining in the Amazon, with all the warnings about climate change? Nope, it just got worse—its highest rate in the past 10 years, the BBC reports. Brazil has released data showing that roughly 3,050 square miles (or nearly 1.5 million football fields) of Earth's biggest rainforest was chopped down between August 2017 and July 2018, a 13.7% increase over the year before. Opinions differ on the cause, with Environment Minister Edson Duarte blaming illegal loggers: "An upsurge in organized crime" is behind it, says Duarte, who calls for a broader battle against "environmental violations and in defense of sustainable development of the biome." Then there's a 2012 forest code that still gives amnesty to anyone who deforests on small properties, notes the Guardian. After declining for years, deforestation began rising in 2013 and increased in four of the following years. Now Brazil is welcoming a new, openly anti-environmentalist president, Jair Bolsonaro, whose foreign minister calls global warming a Marxist plot. Environmentalists say the Amazon rainforest could suffer a 300% deforestation surge under the new regime: "We are already in a very critical situation in terms of climate change," an environmental researcher tells National Geographic. "If we mess up with the Amazon, carbon dioxide emissions will increase so massively that everyone will suffer." Bolsonaro, a 63-year-old former military officer, wants more roads and mines in the rainforest and fewer penalties for chopping down trees. (A scientist calls the decline in forest insects "hyperalarming.")