Deforestation in Colombia dropped 36% in 2023, said Environment Minister Susana Muhamad on Tuesday.
The number of hectares of tropical forest that were lost through went from 123,517 in 2022 to 79,256, the minister said at a meeting in Bogota.
Compared to 2021, when 174,103 hectares of forest were lost, deforestation has gone down as much as 53%, according to the government annual statistics.
Annual deforestation
President Gustavo Petro stressed on Twitter that “this is the lowest deforestation number in 23 years.”
We must reach zero to maintain the lung of the world.
President Gustavo Petro
In April, the minister warned that preliminary data from the last quarter of 2023 and the first quarter of this year indicated that deforestation had been going up again.
In fact, deforestation would have gone up 40% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, according to Muhamad.
The maintenance of the Amazon forest has long been complicated because much of the southern part of Colombia is effectively governed by guerrilla groups, the EMC in particular.
Unlike the now-defunct guerrilla group FARC, which demobilized in 2016, the EMC has been tolerant about the informal construction of roads and cattle ranching, the activities considered most damaging for the Amazon.
The government plans to resume peace talks with a dissident faction of the EMC on Tuesday in the hope that security forces will eventually be able to uphold the law and environmental regulations in the south of the country.
