Florian Plaucheur/AFP via Getty Images
This story is part of
, a new Vox reporting initiative on the science, politics, and economics of the biodiversity crisis.
We’re just four months into the year and things are already looking bleak in the Brazilian Amazon.
About 430,000 acres of its lush, species-rich forests have been logged or burned so far
in 2021, according to a new analysis of satellite imagery by the Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP). That’s an area roughly 30 times the size of Manhattan.
The analysis, published earlier this week, comes as Brazil’s president, Jair Bolsonaro, is negotiating a deal with US officials to funnel what could be billions of dollars into his administration to eliminate illegal deforestation within the decade.