How Has the Pandemic Affected Deforestation in 2020?

While COVID-19 has impacted all facets of our lives across the globe, one of the lesser-explored environmental implications of coronavirus has been its effect on deforestation. While optimists may have speculated that a drop-off in industrial activity on the whole may have been replicated in logging and land clearing activities, the opposite appears to have happened.

That’s down to the opportunism of certain politicians, who have used the fact that the rest of the world is distracted by their efforts to contain the virus in order to push through environmentally unsustainable legislative reforms. In particular, the Brazilian government has viewed the pandemic as an “opportunity” to relax laws protecting the Amazon rainforest and ramp up their deforestation efforts.

‘Infra-legal reforms’

It’s telling that Brazil’s Environment Minister Ricardo Salles – the very individual entrusted with safeguarding the country’s natural beauty – was caught on camera urging his colleagues to push through ‘infra-legal reforms’ on Amazon deforestation while the media was focused on the fallout from coronavirus.

“We need to make an effort while we are in this calm moment in terms of press coverage, because they are only talking about COVID, and push through and change all the rules and simplify norms,” said Salles in a government meeting. The footage of his comments was released after the Supreme Court demanded its publication, leaving environmentalists across the globe in no doubt as to where the priorities of the Bolsonaro government lie with regard to the world’s biggest rainforest.

Unprecedented destruction

Those words have been matched by actions in 2020. In the first quarter of the year, approximately 464 square miles of the Amazon were razed to the ground, which is around 20 times the size of Manhattan and a significant 55% jump from the year previous. Indeed, deforestation across the whole of Brazil increased by 72% between 18-19 and 19-20, reaching an average rate of half a square mile per hour.

In total, around 3,750 square miles of the Amazon were destroyed last year in Brazil. That’s come at a time when funding for FUNAI, the government agency aimed at providing legal protections for indigenous tribes, has been slashed by Bolsonaro, while more and more cabinet positions have been stocked with those from a military background.

Bringing COVID into the rainforest

As well as allowing politicians to usher in environmentally damaging legislation, the pandemic has also affected deforestation in a more direct way. Brazil has infamously been one of the slowest countries to implement measures aimed at tackling the spread of coronavirus, meaning a high percentage of their population have become infected – much of the time unwittingly.

Indigenous communities which reside in the Amazon and are cut off from civilisation are more susceptible to diseases like COVID-19 due to their reduced exposure to human contact. As a result, visiting health officials (or illegal loggers and land grabbers) can bring the disease with them and spread it throughout the tribes, killing some community leaders and hospitalising others. With FUNAI having fewer resources to draw upon, and with fewer members of the communities themselves able to stand up for their rights, the Amazon is perhaps more vulnerable now than it has ever been.