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.
– 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.")