What data can say about Brazil Amazon Deforestation
By: Leon Bueno
Tags: Data Visualization, Analytics, Storytelling, Data Science, Business Intelligence

What data can say about Brazil Amazon Deforestation

Greenpeace Gif

So let's start from the beginning, why Amazon forest is so important not just for Brazil but for the whole world? Well, this is not the topic of our analysis so I’ll let you a video that explains it pretty quickly! Click play below and see! It’s just for 2 minutes.

Back to the analysis, I built a Power Bi (PBI)for you to explore the data with me! It's available here! It’s important to say that all charts and analysis I take from it.

The Question…

So the question here is what we’re doing to save this big heritage of humanity. Actually, Brazil has reduced deforestation if we compare it to begin of the ’00s. In 2001 we lost close to 55.000 Km² of the forest, and in 2018 (last year of closed data available) is was 7.000 Km², well it's a great performance, right? It depends, 7000 km² is equivalent to 1.034.040 soccer fields, in other words, we can say that we burnt 125 Mahantan Islands in 2018! But, of course, that is a good result we reduced it 7 times! let's take a look at a timeline chart.

Image from author

It proves what we’re saying above, but the last 5 years really worried me, so I’ll break it into two-time lapses, one from 2001 to 2010 and the other from 2011 to 2019.

2001–2010

The first split shows us that we had good results in this first decade, especially in 2002 and 2006 that the deforestation drop by 50% comparing the previous year, another interesting point is the PBI forecast, we can say that it worked pretty well forecasting a dropping tendency. let’s see our second chart.

2011–2019*

Here is the problem, in 2019 we back to 2006 values, and the data from this year isn’t closed yet. It proves that in this decade we’re losing the battle. An important factor for this increment in 2019 could be Bolsonaro’s election and his speech in favor of exploring the Amazon, but we’re not talking about politics here. Important look to PBI forecasting which pointed to a stability trend and again we can say that worked well except in 2019, but it isn’t a PBI issue.

Now we change our analysis focus, let’s look into how states handle this problem, let's look at the chart below.

2001–2011

Here is the rank that no one wants to be the first, so we’ll go deep into our winner, Para. The state cleared an incredible 100.295 Km², here is what it represents in other areas.

You read it right! Para has cleared 1 Portugal in 20 years, 10% percent of the forest in this state, it is extremely huge.

The Soldiers…

Who are the soldiers that are fighting against deforestation in Brazil? There is a lot of non-governmental organizations but I want to give a highlight in an Amazon Fund. This organization, which started in 2009, receive funds from European countries e distribute them over the projects to save the Amazon, it’s really interesting to read about them and about the projects that they are working on. In my “dashboard” I inserted a card that shows the investment over years, since the beginning they invested almost U$ 230 million in those projects, and I ask myself how Amazon would be like if it weren’t for them.

Resume

To summarize what happened to the Amazon forest over those years I’ll ask for help with the visualization that compares areas.

That's right my dear reader, we burnt almost 3 Portugal areas, 4555 Manhattan Islands, and a huge amount of soccer fields, we need to work to decrease it and recover what we already lost!

Conclusion

This is not a professional analysis and I don’t even work with it, it’s just an exploratory analysis, very simple by the way, which seeks to show what’s happening with our Amazon rainforest, so the conclusion that I take is that Brazil is doing great in its work to save the forest, we know that it is very difficult to take deforestation at rates close to zero, but we need to keep going, try to break this increase for the last years and give our kids a world with forest.

Please! Explore the data by yourself here.

Some Details

*2019 data is not closed yet;

Data can be found on the PRODES website

Enjoy the Amazon Fund website!

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