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"The government fears that the alarming data could prejudice an important trade deal between the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, and the EU. Environmentalists said the damage had already been done.
Brazil space institute director sacked in Amazon
deforestation row
Far-right leader Jair Bolsonaro calls satellite data showing
rise in deforestation ‘lies’
Dom Phillips in Rio de Janeiro
Fri 2 Aug 2019 19.11 BST Last modified on Fri 2 Aug 2019
23.10 BST
The director of Brazil’s National Space Research Institute
(INPE) has been sacked in the midst of a controversy over its satellite data
showing a rise in Amazon deforestation, which the far-right president, Jair
Bolsonaro, has called “lies”.
Ricardo Galvão, who had defended the institute and
criticised Bolsonaro’s attack, was dismissed on Friday after a meeting with the
science and technology minister, Marcos Pontes.
“The way I
expressed myself in relation to the president has caused an unsustainable
embarrassment,” Galvão said on Friday morning, according to the Folha de S
Paulo newspaper site.
“Sacking the director of INPE is just an act
of vengeance against someone who showed the truth,” said Greenpeace Brasil’s
public policy coordinator, Márcio Astrini, in a statement.
Created in 2004, the Deter satellite system makes monthly
and daily data publicly available on a regularly updated government website.
Its data for recent months showed an alarming rise in deforestation in recent
months: it soared 88% in June compared with a year earlier. The first half of
July was 68% up on the whole of July 2018.
Bolsonaro and has
ministers have called its release irresponsible and an attempt to stain
Brazil’s image abroad. Last month he called INPE numbers “lies” and
implied that Galvão was in “the service” of a foreign non-profit group. The
next day Galvão said the president behaved “like he is in a bar” and defended
the institute’s data.
The most accurate data on deforestation in the Brazilian
Amazon is collected by the Prodes satellite system and released annually. The
Deter satellite system has a lower resolution and is primarily used for
deforestation alerts, said Tasso Azevedo, a former head of Brazil’s forest
service. But over the last 12 years, whenever annual Deter data showed
deforestation increasing, Prodes confirmed the trend and calculated an even
higher rate. Publicly available Prodes data goes back to 1988.
Azevedo is the coordinator of MapBiomas, an initiative from
NGOs, universities and technology companies that monitors changes in land use.
He said that from January to July, accumulated Deter numbers showed a 62%
increase in deforestation compared with the same period last year, and that
three other international satellite monitoring systems had also shown rising
deforestation. “All have different methodology, so the data is different, but
all of them point to a rise in deforestation,” he said.
On Thursday,
Bolsonaro and the environment minister, Ricardo Salles, criticised the release
of data as irresponsible and sensationalist. “The numbers were thrashed
out, it seems to me, with the aim of striking at the name of Brazil and the
government,” Bolsonaro said.
In a presentation, Salles said his team had found hundreds
of areas of deforestation included in the July figures from previous months or
years. He did not explain the methodology used. INPE defended its numbers in a
statement and said it had not been given prior access to Salles’s study.
The government fears that the alarming data could prejudice
an important trade deal between the South American trade bloc, Mercosur, and
the EU. Environmentalists said the damage had already been done.
“Brazil’s image is already hopelessly compromised by this
crusade against the facts,” said Carlos Rittl, executive secretary of the
Climate Observatory.
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