AMAZON REGION IN BRAZIL STILL BURNING A MONTH AFTER BAN ON FIRES

A month after the ban on burning land, the Brazilian Amazon region is still registering a high number of illegal fires, Deutsche Presse-Agentur (dpa) reported on August 18, 2020.

"The figures show that the government's strategy is not effective at stopping the destruction of the forest with the greatest biodiversity on the planet," Christiane Mazzetti, spokeswoman for Greenpeace Brasil's Amazon campaign, said on Monday.

The National Institute for Space Research, which analyses satellite data, detected 20,473 fires between July 16 and August 15. In the first 15 days of August alone there were more than 15,000 fires. This is a minimal decrease of 8 per cent compared to the same period in 2019.

At this time last year there was neither a ban on burning nor did the government send the military in to join the fight against the flames. On July 16, the Brazilian government banned the burning of land in the Amazonregion and in the Pantanal, the world's largest marshland, for 120 days. However, it was questionable whether Brazil would actually step up its efforts to halt the fires. President Jair Bolsonaro is a proponent of the economic exploitation of the Amazon, and his government plans to deploy the country's armed forces in the Amazon region by 2022.