The deforestation in Brazil last year it was extended 20,576 square kilometers vegetationan area 22.3% larger than the area destroyed in 2021 and equal to the territory of a country like Israel or Slovenia, according to a study released this Monday by the scientific platform MapBiomas.

Brazil destroyed an average of 56.4 square kilometers of forests, savannas or rural flora every day last year, an area the size of a country like Bermuda, according to MapBiomas, a network that brings together NGOs, universities and technology companies to analyze land use using satellite imagery.

He MapBiomas 2022 Annual Deforestation Report includes the devastation throughout the Brazilian territory from the analysis of the 76,193 points at which the satellites alerted for the disappearance of vegetation cover in all ecosystems of the country, including the Amazon, the Cerrado (savannah) and the Pantanal.

According to MapBiomas in the past four years since then began publishing annual deforestation reports, Brazil has lost about 66,000 square kilometers of vegetationan area the size of a country like Lithuania or Sri Lanka.

The Latin American giant had already lost 16,824 square kilometers in 2021area 20% larger than that destroyed in 2020.

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Brazil’s greatest destruction last year was recorded in the Amazon, the largest tropical rainforest in the world, with the destruction of 11,926 square kilometers (an area the size of Qatar), 58% of all deforested vegetation in the country. According to MapBiomas calculations, the Brazilian Amazon lost an average of 21 trees per second last year.

Among the ecosystems that lost the most vegetation in 2022 were the Cerrado, with 6,597 square kilometers (32.1% of the total) deforested, and the Caatinga (semi-arid zone of the northeast), with 1,406 square kilometers (6.8 %). In the Atlantic Forest, the most devastated ecosystem in the country and which has already lost 71% of its vegetation, another 100 kilometers were destroyed last year (1.5% of the total).

The Atlantic Forest, howeverwas the only ecosystem in which deforestation was reduced last yearas the other five recorded ascents, including the Pantanal and the Pampa.

The MapBiomas study concluded that the areas most affected by deforestation last year were those with jungle vegetation (64.9% of the total), followed by savanna vegetation (31.3%) and rural vegetation (3.6%) .

It also concluded that the best-preserved areas, on the other hand, are those occupied by indigenous lands, where deforestation was equivalent to 1.4% of the area destroyed in the country last year.

Open space logging for agriculture was responsible for 95.7% of all deforestation recorded last year in Brazil, one of the world’s largest producers and exporters of food and a world leader in products such as meat and soybeans.