Almost 80% of logging in the state of Pará is illegal, but loggers and sawmills here have clever scams that give illegal timber a cover story. Greenpeace discovered that the DIY chain Jewson was selling decking made from ipe, a rare tree found in the Amazon. Jewson buys its ipe from International Timber, who admitted to buying the timber without any third-party check to verify the chain of custody. Greenpeace have asked the NMO to investigate Jewson and International Timber, as well as other companies importing and selling timber from the Brazilian Amazon.

Brazilian municipalities are turning to drones as they prepare to implement the new Forest Code which requires farmers in the Amazon to preserve up to 80 per cent of the forest on their land. The country’s biggest municipality in the Amazonian state of Pará has already purchased a drone at a cost of more than R$100,000 (over £25,000). The drones can fly for five hours at a time and photograph in detail 20,000-30,000 hectares per flight. The company manufacturing the drones said that demand has experienced a sharp increase in the past year, much of this coming from hydropower companies looking to monitor their vast properties in the Amazon against invasions by illegal settlers, deforestation and other problems.

A new report titled ‘Logging Concessions Enable Illegal Logging Crisis in the Peruvian Amazon’ has found that the Peruvian Forest Law is being exploited for illegal purposes. Loggers are required to declare which individual, GPS-referenced trees will be cut in a one or five year period. As a result many have invented the existence of trees, they then log in other areas and claim trees came from inside their concessions and use the paperwork from these concessions to “prove” it. In over half the cases violations have related to CITES-listed cedar species. Nearly 70% of the concessions inspected have been suspected of “major violations”. This follows what was supposed to be a strengthening of the law through a trade agreement between Peru and the United States in 2009. The report’s authors say the root of the problem is that the authorities only check the regulatory documents in transport or at port arrival well after the logging has taken place. The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) has previously been highly critical of Peruvian logging practices highlighting the abuse of migrant workers and strategies designed to confuse the authorities in order to cover up illegal logging.

Brazil’s Environmental Minister Izabella Teixeira has said that the rate of deforestation in the Amazon rainforest has increased by 28 per cent in the past year.
Provisional statistics suggest that the increase has seen 5,843 sq km of rainforest suffer from deforestation between August 2012 and July 2013, compared to 4,571 sq km in the previous 12 months. Although the statistics are still significantly below those of 2004, the Brazilian Government is still concerned that the rate of deforestation is now on the rise. Many environmentalists blame the upwards trend on a forest protection law reform in 2012, which reduced the protected areas in farms and declared an amnesty for all areas destroyed before 2008.

Although the news of the 28% increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon last week was unwelcomed, it was not surprising. The rise is attributable to the fact that there are still no positive incentives available to farmers and livestock growers. This study reviews four hypotheses from the media and literature asking why deforestation has increased but concludes that deforestation is a result of a combination of factors.

Deforestation in the Amazon has increased 28% in the 12 months through the end of July 2013. The rise is accountable by expanding farms and a rush for land around big infrastructure projects. Changes to Brazil’s forestry laws are also attributable to the increase, as well as high global prices for agricultural commodities.

Peruvian environmental prosecutor, Francisco Berrospi, comments on the corruption he has experienced first-hand across the timber trade in the Peruvian Amazon. A slideshow also accompanies this story: http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2013/10/19/world/americas/20131019Peru.html?ref=americas

Aerial footage of the Peruvian Amazon shows large-scale forest clearance as a result of gold mining operations. The rate of expansion of gold mining operations has tripled in recent years, and reports suggest the majority of mining is illegal.

Data released this week by Terra-i, a collaborative mapping initiative, shows that deforestation in Ecuador for the first three months of 2013 was pacing more than 300 percent ahead of last year's rate. The report comes shortly after Ecuadorean President Rafael Correa killed off a proposed plan to prohibit oil drilling in Yasuni National Park in exchange for payments equivalent to half the value of the park's unexploited oil reserves.

Terra-i, a collaboration between the International Center for Tropical Agriculture (CIAT) in Colombia, The Nature Conservancy (TNC), the School of Business and Engineering (HEIG-VD) in Switzerland and King’s College London (KCL), uses NASA satellite data to detect deforestation in Latin America on 16-day basis. The system shows that between Jan 1 and Mar 7 this year, some 9,075 ha of Ecuador's forests were cleared. By comparison, 2,931 ha of forest were chopped down during the year-earlier period.

With deforestation up by 90% on 2012’s rate of loss, Brazil has bolstered the number of environmental inspectors in the forest to curb illegal clearing. Landowners clearing forests are struggling to escape detection by the government’s near-real-time satellite forest monitoring system, DETER, but are starting to clear smaller forest areas that the system cannot see at its 25-hectare resolution. A higher resolution system that would detect this clearing, known as PRODES, is only used annually. Environmentalists believe the more relaxed revisions to the Forest Code, implemented in 2012, accounted for this rise in clearing.

The Brazilian government released data that confirmed an increase in Amazon forest loss, with the majority of clearing taking place in Mato Grosso for agriculture. Reasons for the increase are thought to derive from weakening of the country's Forest Code, which limits clearing on private forest land, and agricultural exports have also become more commercially attractive for farmers.

‘Green Carbon, Black Trade’, a joint report from UNEP and INTERPOL says that $30-$100 billion of revenue are lost by key logging countries each year to the illegal timber trade. The losses are mainly attributed to key logging countries in Central Africa, the Amazon Basin and South East Asia. An editor of the report highlights how organised crime has become more sophisticated over the past decade with government websites hacked to extract logging permits, falsifying certificates and laundering timber by selling it through plantations.

Experts are warning that the focus on Brazil, which hosts 60% of the Amazonian rainforest, is deflecting attention from increasing Amazonian deforestation in neighbouring countries such as Bolivia, Peru, Columbia and Venezuela. The main driver is considered to be the commodities boom centred on exports to China and other Asian economies. Conservation International in Bolivia say that government policies and subsidies encourage business development in the Amazon which inevitably leads to deforestation.

A study published in Science modelling species extinction in the Brazilian Amazon has concluded that the extinction of many species in certain regions is inevitable. The study models several future scenarios ranging from “business as usual” to a “strong reduction” and found that even in the best case scenario deforestation will lead to the extinction of around 38 species locally. Future threats to the Amazon come from planned hydroelectric power plants and the risks of deforestation which might follow the changes to Brazil’s Forest Code.

The Surui Forest Carbon Project (SFCP) is the first UN Reducing Emissions from Deforestation and Forest Degradation (REDD) project to directly pay indigenous tribes to protect the rainforest. It provides carbon income to tribes protecting the Amazon against illegal loggers. However, Surui leaders claim that loggers have increased their threats and are trying to bribe dissenting members of the tribe with firearms. The tribe hopes that calling in the police will send a clear message to illegal loggers and also encourage other Amazonian tribes to adopt the SFCP model.

The latest satellite-based data on deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon shows a year-on-year decrease with 830 sq km of clearance detected since August 2011 compared to 1,268 sq km the previous year. The annual amount of deforestation has fallen by nearly eighty per cent since 2004 due to various measures including increased law enforcement, financial incentives, better monitoring and the rising price of agricultural exports. Proposed changes to the Forest Code could halt or reverse this progress.

Pressure is building on President Dilma Rousseff to veto The Forest Code ahead of the deadline on 25th May. The Forest Code reduces the obligation on landowners to protect Amazonian forest cover down from 80 to 50 per cent, leading to the potential loss of 190 million acres of forest according to the Brazilian Government’s Institute for Applied Economic Research. It is being seen as a battle between the increasingly powerful ‘ruralistas’, legislators representing agricultural interests, and a range of other stakeholders including environmental NGOs, leading national scientific groups, Brazilian celebrities and even many large businesses such as Tetra Pak Brasil.

More than 8,500 Brazilian troops are taking part in an operation along Brazil’s remote northern border to tackle drug trafficking, logging and illegal mining. Part of the operation will involve looking for illegal logging in protected indigenous land.

Major amendments to Brazil’s Forest Code are on the brink of passing into law. The changes allow reserve areas in the Amazon to be reduced from 80 to 50% and reduce the restriction on forest clearance near rivers. Agriculturalists have welcomed the amendments.

In response to the impending passing into law of Brazil’s Forest Code (see previous story) Greenpeace is campaigning for a veto against the legislation, claiming that it could lead to deforestation of 22 million hectares of rainforest (an area nearly equivalent to the size of the UK). Also, in response to the legislation, 130,000 Brazilian citizens backed by a number of Brazilian celebrities have signed a citizen’s initiative launched by Greenpeace Brazil for a new Zero Deforestation law to protect the rainforest.