Illegal logging in the Amazon jumped by 19% over the past year, according to a new report. Between August 2022 and July 2023, some 126,000 hectares, or 311,000 acres, of forest were cleared illicitly, equivalent to cutting timber from 350 football fields every day without environmental authorization.
Experts point to a troubling shift: as illegal logging soars, legal timber extraction is declining, meaning that the percentage of illegal wood leaving the Amazon is increasing.
“With predatory logging, the removal of timber leaves more openings and much more degradation,” said Leonardo Sobral, forestry director at the Institute for Forest and Agricultural Management and Certification (Imaflora), one of the Brazilian nonprofits behind the report. “Sustainable forest management, on the other hand, is planned, minimizing the impact and making it much harder to detect in satellite images.”
Sustainable forest management in the Brazilian Amazon limits logging to three to five trees per hectare (about one to two per acre), enforcing strict rules on tree selection, timing and methods. But legal operations are often used to launder illegal wood from surrounding areas. Hardly any noncertified wood is sold commercially, in both domestic and international markets.
Satellite images show that a third of all tropical wood felled over the last two to three years was sourced from illegal origins, the report highlighted, reaching 35% in the 2022-2023 period.
About 8% of Brazil’s Amazonian timber is exported. Of this, 48% goes to Europe and 20% to the United States.
Illegal loggers not only degrade the forests but also pose serious threats to Indigenous peoples, as 16% of illegally logged wood in the Amazon comes from Indigenous lands.
The Kaxarari and Tenharim Marmelos Indigenous territories, located in the southwestern Amazon near the BR-319 highway, a deforestation hotspot, were the hardest hit, the report found.
“Every year the situation just gets more difficult,” Edson Kaxarari, president of the Kaxarari Indigenous Community Association, told Mongabay by phone. “We have no support here. People come and invade; if we confront them, they threaten us. I’ve been threatened myself. If I speak up too much and someone finds out, they’ll come to my house, as they’ve done several times before.”
Despite hopes that Brazil’s new government under President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva would bring relief to Indigenous communities, whose territories are meant to be strictly protected, invasions of their lands have worsened. “We thought things would improve with a government that cares about Indigenous peoples,” Edson added. “But it hasn’t turned out as we expected.”
Banner image: Illegal logging in Colniza, in Brazil’s Mato Grosso state, in 2018. Image courtesy of the Life Center Institute (ICV).