February 15, 2017.-The National Forestry and Wildlife Service (SERFOR) of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation and the National Forest Conservation Program for the Mitigation of Climate Change of the Ministry of the Environment of Peru presented, as part of their joint actions, the report of loss of cover of Amazonian forests in 2015.
According to the report, prepared with the support of the Observation Room of the Forest Cover Monitoring Project in the Amazon Region of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization (ACTO), in 2015 the loss of Amazonian forests in Peru was 156,462 hectares, which represents 11.9% less than the number published in 2014, which was 177,566 hectares. Currently, the surface area of Amazon rainforest is 69,020,330 hectares.
The municipalities with the highest loss of forests in 2015 were Loreto, with almost 32,000 hectares, followed by Ucayali, with almost 30 thousand, Huanuco, with 23,000, and San Martín, with 22 thousands. The SERFOR pointed out that the governments of these regions began the forest zoning process that will serve as territorial planning tool to utilize neatly territory by identifying areas for direct use, conservation, recovery, among others.
The event was inaugurated by the Deputy Minister of Agrarian Policies of the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation, Pablo Quijandría Salmón, and the Deputy Minister of Environmental Management of the Ministry of the Environment, Marcos Alegre Chang.
The Deputy Minister Pablo Quijandría highlighted the joint work and the work with common and integrated information, which means a great advance of the State, which united with other platforms and database constitutes an instrument of planning for all sectors.
“These numbers will allow us to have a common language, as well as a georeference of the loss of forest cover. From this, identify the possible causes of deforestation. We have different ways of utilizationof the forests that we must improve and this information will help us a lot, “he emphasized.
For his part, Deputy Minister Marcos Alegre highlighted that the environmental sector is committed to promoting green growth and stressed that having official information will greatly help the public and private sectors that live or work in the forest to promote conservation and sustainable utilization.
He also stressed that this information “generates knowledge and greater understanding of Peruvian forests and allows us to establish future scenarios to know how to act better.”
The presentation of data on loss of Amazonian rainforest was divided into three blockswas jointly exposed by experts from both ministries and the ACTO Observation Room.
The first block presented the background and results of the loss of cover of the Amazon rainforest in the year 2015. The second block dealt with the methodology of joint work and verification process of the information. While in the last part, the main uses of information of forest loss were built up.
In turn, the executive coordinator of the MINAM Forests Program, César Calmet, said that the goal is not to stay only in the data from now on. “Data is just part of a larger process. It must lead us to improve our intervention as a state through the environmental and forest sector, and other sectors of the country. The effort now is to know how to use this information, explore it to meet the needs and problems of citizens”, he said.
Finally, the executive director of SERFOR, John Leigh, indicated that as Peru has the implemented technology to know the loss of forest cover and the early warning mechanism, the next step is to do preventive action to reverse and substantially reduce deforestation in the country.
He also stressed that the Ministry of Agriculture and Irrigation leads the Multisectoral Commission to Combat the Illegal Court to work together and articulate on these issues.
Download the presentations (in Spanish)
Review the complete data of forest cover and lossdata in 2015 here
Source: ACTO Monitoring Project
