Illegal deforestation rises in South America’s Indigenous territories, parks 29 December, 2020 - 18:50 Between 2010 and 2020, South America lost an average of 2.6 million hectares of forest per year, according the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO). In other words, the continent lost an area of forest the size of Ecuador in the space of a decade. South America’s rate of deforestation seems to be increasing. Satellite data from the University of Maryland visualized on the online platform Global Forest Watch show tree cover loss in South America rose 2.8% between 2018 and 2019. Colombia, Peru and Bolivia had particularly big surges in deforestation. “We’ve been noticing an upsurge in deforestation in recent years in the Amazon, in general,” says María Olga Borja, a deforestation specialist at EcoCiencia, in Ecuador, and an analyst at the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-environmental Information (RAISG). Preliminary UMD data for 2020 indicate a similar trend in 2020, with many regions registering higher numbers of deforestation alerts than during the same periods in 2019. For instance, between January and October 2020, UMD registered some 16,300 deforestation alerts in just two protected areas: Catatumbo Barí National Park in Colombia and Concepción[...]