A tale of two maps: Brazilian state won’t use new atlas to close Cerrado deforestation loophole
▻http://news.mongabay.com/2015/0413-sri-borrell-cerrado-deforestation-loophole.html
Farmers in north-central Brazil, where the savanna meets the Amazon rainforest, are clearing land at an unprecedented rate. The government hasn’t stopped the cutting, partly because it is using inaccurate, outdated maps that hugely underestimate the extent of its endangered dry forests. State regulators in Tocantins have continued using the old maps, even after commissioning superior, detailed vegetation maps that could identify at-risk forest patches and help curb deforestation.
“Years from now when we are without water, they will regret it,” says Ricardo Haidar, a forest engineer based in the city of Palmas. “The government paid for the study, but they are not using the data.”
Tocantins, Brazil’s newest state, was named in 1988 after its shape which looks like a toucan’s beak with the tip pointing north toward the Amazon River, some 400 miles away. Though the majority of the state is within the biodiverse savanna known as the Cerrado, it has some of the region’s most extensive forests and forms a critical transition zone that merges into Amazonia.
In December 2014, Kátia Abreu — the Tocantins senator who environmentalists have called “Miss Deforestation” and the “Chainsaw Queen” — was named Brazil’s Minister of Agriculture, putting the state’s poor environmental record in the national spotlight. All along the Belem-Brasilia Highway, one of the state’s major north-south thoroughfares, locals have watched Tocantins’ forests being razed for soy and rice crops at a stunning pace. Forests in this corner of the Cerrado shrank by 66 percent between 1977 and 2008, and they will likely vanish completely in the next 25 years unless action is taken, says a 2013 study published in Biotropica.
