The Brazilian state of Rondônia state ranks seventh in the country for deforestation and fourth for greenhouse gas emissions. Among the country’s nine Amazonian states, it’s third for deforestation, behind only Pará and Mato Grosso. These figures — published in 2023 in the Annual Report on Deforestation in Brazil from the MapBiomas Alerta initiative; in the System for Estimating Emissions and Removals of Greenhouse Gases (SEEG) from the Climate Observatory; and in TerraBrasilis from the Brazilian national space institute — confirm the trend of landscape change in Rondônia in recent decades. In 1970, at the start of the SEEG’s historical series, Rondônia was in 26th place, out of 26 states in Brazil, for emissions, as it had little deforestation and livestock activity compared to the rest of the country. By 1994, it was up to third place, and over the last 10 years has never fallen out of the top 10 GHG emitters in Brazil. “In the 1970s and 1980s, the farmers who colonized the state, mainly from the south, knew how to work with exposed land, so there was a lot of deforestation,” says Samuel dos Santos Nienow, a biologist and regional coordinator for ICMBio, the federal agency in charge of protected areas, based in Porto Velho, the Rondônia state capital. “There were already Indigenous communities, quilombolas [rural Afro-Brazilian communities] and extractivists in our territory who were in the forest and had other models for extracting wealth, but they lost ground in the face of the strength of those…This article was originally published on Mongabay
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