FB is largely contributing to the destruction of the Amazon forest in detriment of climate stability

With 670 million hectares and covering eight countries (1;p6), the world’s largest tropical rainforest, the Amazon, helps maintain climate stability storing around 100 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide(2). The Amazon is home to about three million species of plants and animals and one million Indigenous people(3). However, the forest is losing 1.4 million hectares per year from deforestation, and Brazil is responsible for 75%(1;p6). Despite Brazil´s goal of reducing deforestation to 390k hectares per year, 1.11 million hectares of rainforest were destroyed from August 2019 to July 2020, 9.5%+ than the previous year(4). Illegal logging is the catalyst for deforestation (5) and much profitable, as clearing land can increase its value by up to 200 times (6).

A BBC undercover operation found in 2021 that protected areas of the Brazilian Amazon rainforest grabbed from Indigenous peoples, as large as 1k football pitches (820 hectares (7), are being illegally cleared and sold on Facebook Marketplace by land invaders without land titles (8). This way, Facebook is connecting land grabbers to millions of buyers (9).

One strategy is to clear the land and plead to abolish its protected status by showing it no longer serves its original purpose (8). Sellers made profits through Facebook Marketplace even by tripling the initial price (8). Many Facebook-ads come from Rondonia, the most deforested state in Brazil (8). Plots inside Indigenous reserves are for sale for about USD23,124 (8).

A Brazilian Senate's Commission demanded Facebook to curb this practice (3), and Indigenous communities urged Facebook to intervene (8). In April, a Greenpeace petition asking Facebook to ban the illegal sales topped 101k signatories (10). However, Facebook confirmed it will not take independent action to halt the trade (8), and it has failed to remove some of the ads that were flagged by the BBC (3). After the BBC report, several Facebook-ads were still offering stolen land of 30,000 hectares (6).

Facebook is contributing to illegal land grabbing, illegal deforestation, and illegal trade of protected areas in the Brazilian Amazon, further exacerbating the growing destruction of its forest's biodiversity and natural life, in detriment of the world's climate stability.

This post was originally published on May 20, 2021 at Impaakt.com . Find the original post here.