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1 January 2020 Amazon Deforestation in Brazil: What Has Not Happened and How the Global Media Covered It
Doug Boucher, Dora Chi
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Abstract

There has been no further change in the deforestation rate in the Brazilian Amazon since our 2013 article in Tropical Conservation Science on the dramatic reduction in deforestation in the late 2000s. This lack of change was actually a remarkable occurrence because deforestation remained stable during a period of major economic recession and great political turbulence at the national level. Coverage of Brazilian Amazon deforestation in the global media during this period was misleading, emphasizing short-term increases in deforestation and erroneously presenting them as “balancing” the earlier dramatic reduction. However, the steady level of deforestation during this period does represent a political failure in which national political leaders did not achieve—or even try to achieve—the eminently feasible goal of zero deforestation.

© The Author(s) 2018 Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage).
Doug Boucher and Dora Chi "Amazon Deforestation in Brazil: What Has Not Happened and How the Global Media Covered It," Tropical Conservation Science 11(1), (1 January 2020). https://doi.org/10.1177/1940082918794325
Received: 6 July 2018; Accepted: 19 July 2018; Published: 1 January 2020
KEYWORDS
Amazon forest
balance as bias
Brazil
deforestation rate
political turmoil
recession
stability
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