Amazon deforestation in Brazil remains near 15-year high

By FABIANO MAISONNAVE
Associated Press

RIO DE JANEIRO (AP) — Closely-watched numbers for annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon show the total area of forest loss is down somewhat from last year, but that was a 15-year high. The data was released by the National Institute for Space Research. The agency’s Prodes monitoring system showed that the Amazon rainforest that lies within Brazil — which is two-thirds of it — lost an area roughly the size of Qatar, over 11,000 square kilometers of rainforest (about 4,500 square miles) in the 12 months from August 2021 to July 2022. President-elect Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who will take office in January, promised cheering crowds at the recent U.N. climate conference in Egypt to end all deforestation in the country by 2030.