Amazonian timber for sale in Brazil.

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NELSON ALMEIDA / AFP

The Amazon rainforest continues to lose ground, despite improving slightly from last year.

According to the latest official data released this Friday by the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), 964 km2 were deforested in September alone.

A drop of 34% compared to the same month of 2019, the year of all records.

With 7,063 km2 of tropical forests less, the level of deforestation for the first nine months of the year remains below the level of 2019 (7,869 km2), the first year of the term of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro.

But this total is significantly higher than that of the 12 months of the four previous years (4,951 km2 in 2018, 3,551 km2 in 2017, 6,032 km2 in 2016 and 2,195 km2 in 2015).

Two football fields every minute

“The deforestation figures remain very high and unacceptable.

In September, an area equivalent to two football fields was cleared every minute, ”reacted in a statement Marcio Astrini, the executive secretary of the NGO collective Climate Observatory.

And even if deforestation has decreased compared to 2019, the number of fires increased by 61% in September compared to the same month last year, with 32,017 outbreaks identified by INPE satellites.

Over the first nine months of the year, the total stands at 76,030 households, against 66,749 from January to September 2019, an increase of 14%.

Fires in the south of the country

Further south, in the Pantanal, the fires have broken all records: with 8,106 outbreaks, September 2020 is by far the worst month since these statistics began to be established by the INPE in 1998.

The record for a whole year, which dated from 2005 (12,536 outbreaks) has already been smashed in nine months, with 18,259 outbreaks since January.

Thursday, the office of the Advocate General of the union (AGU), which defends the government, had to provide explanations to the Supreme Court about this upsurge in forest fires.

According to the AGU, the government has not failed in its task and the fires are mainly due to the "historic drought" which affects the Pantanal and the Amazon.

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