More than half of the Cerrado area has already been deforested, study shows

Data from the Cerrados Institute indicate that more than half of the biome’s area — 53% — has already been deforested. The rate is even higher than the deforestation rate in the Amazon, which is below 20%. Called the “Cradle of Waters”, the Cerrado is a protagonist in the preservation of the country’s river basins. According to the Institute, eight of the 12 main national basins depend, at some level, on the water that the Cerrado produces, stores and distributes.

Despite its importance, the Cerrado has more than five million hectares of areas that need to be legally restored and another 30 million hectares of degraded or underutilized pastures. In 2023 alone, the area of ​​forest lost in the biome increased by almost 50%, according to data from the National Institute for Space Research (INPE).

“We did a study to look at the basins for the Cerrado threads. We found that, in an analysis from 1985 to 2022, on average, the cerrado rivers have already lost more than 15.4% of their river flow”, warns Yuri Salmona, president of the Cerrados Institute.

Faced with the increase in deforestation, the Cerrados Institute, in partnership with organizations such as the UN Global Compact and Coca-Cola Brasil, created the Brazilian coalition for water resilience.

The unprecedented action is a call for new companies to join forces by investing in water security initiatives and in organizations capable of carrying out conservation and restoration projects in the country.

“We want to bring about a recovery in these river basins, we want to ensure that these Brazilian rivers do not stop producing water. This is the main objective, we cannot allow Brazil, one of the richest countries in fresh water on the planet, to have very low availability in its rivers”, points out Rubens Filho, water and ocean manager at the UN Global Compact.

To preserve the biome, and consequently the water, Coca-Cola Brasil, in partnership with the Cerrados Institute, uses the Suindara program to monitor fires and deforestation in the cerrado.

“Any outbreak of fire, any outbreak of deforestation, it issues a warning to fire brigades, public authorities, civil society and NGOs about the route and the combat plan. So, in the last two years, more than 60 thousand hectares were protected or prevented from being burned”, explains Rodrigo Brito, Director of Sustainability Brazil and Southern Cone at Coca-Cola Latin America.