Amazon Destruction

#environment - The Amazon, the world’s largest rainforest, lost 11,968 square kilometers (4,600 square miles) in the 12 months through July 2008, an area about 10 times as large as New York City. The loss compares with 11,532 square kilometers in the same period a year earlier.

The Amazon Basin encompasses seven million square kilometers (1.7 billion acres), of which five and a half million square kilometers (1.4 billion acres) are covered by the Amazon Rainforest.

Between 1991 and 2000, the total area of forest lost in the Amazon rose from 415,000 to 587,000 km² (an area larger than France), with most of the lost forest becoming pasture for cattle. The pace of deforestation had been falling since it reached a nine-year high of 27,379 square kilometers in 2004. It accelerated in the end of 2007 and beginning of 2008 as global commodity prices surged.

At the current rate of deforestation, the Amazon Rainforest will be reduced by 40% in two decades.

Source: Bloomberg, Brazilian National Institute of Space Research , Wikipedia