The federal raids in Alta Floresta, Brazil, surprised locals in 2005. The year before, nearly 60,000 acres of rainforest had been torn out of the municipality. Now farmers and loggers were being arrested by armed police, accused of environmental crimes. “It was a radical operation,” the newly elected mayor later recalled during an interview with a Princeton University researcher. “All our economic activity stopped.”
A few years later, Brazil’s central bank made it harder for property owners there, and in 35 other blacklisted areas, to borrow money, unless they proved they were protecting the rainforest. The campaign marked a sharp change from the 1970s, when the federal government, then a military dictatorship, had encouraged clearcutting. Now the federal government was cracking down on it — and doing so successfully. In 2010, fewer than 1,000 acres of Alta Floresta was deforested.
Efforts such as these to slow deforestation have delivered some of humanity’s few gains in its otherwise lackadaisical battle so far against global warming. A gradual slowdown in chainsawing and bulldozing, particularly in Brazil, helped reduce deforestation’s annual toll on the climate by nearly a quarter between the 1990s and 2010.
http://www.weather.com/science/environment/news/agriculture-farming-worse-climate-change-deforestation-united-nations
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