Cutting down on cutting down

摘要

In the 1990s, when an area of Brazilian rainforest the size of Belgium was felled every year, Brazil was the world's environmental villain and the Amazonian jungle the image of everything that was going wrong in green places. Now, the Amazon ought to be the image of what is going right. Government figures show that deforestation fell by 70% in the Brazilian Amazon region during the past decade, from a ten-year average of 19,500 km~2 (7,500 square miles) per year in 2005 to 5,800 km~2 in 2013. If clearances had continued at their rate in 2005, an extra 3.2 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide would have been put into the atmosphere. That is an amount equal to a year's emissions from the European Union. Arguably, then, Brazil is now the world leader in tackling climate change.