Brazil government figures confirm spike in Amazon deforestation

[YahooNews]

By Paulo Prada RIO DE JANEIRO (Reuters) - Deforestation in the Amazon increased by nearly a third over the past year, according to Brazilian government figures released on Thursday, confirming a feared reversal in what had been steady progress over the past decade against destruction of the world's largest rainforest. The figure, boosted partly by expanding farms and a rush for land around big infrastructure projects, is the second-lowest annual tally since Brazil's space agency began tracking deforestation. "You can't argue with numbers," said Marcio Astrini, coordinator for the Amazon campaign at the Brazilian chapter of Greenpeace, the environmentalist group. "This is not alarmist - it's a real and measured inversion of what had been a positive trend." Brazil tracks the amount of land cleared each year as part of its efforts to protect the Amazon, a Western European-sized jungle that is an abundant source of the world's oxygen and fresh water and considered by scientists to be a crucial buffer against climate change.