Arc of Deforestation (Arco do Desmatamento)

node · earth · Southern and eastern Brazilian Amazon

The crescent of active clearance along the southern and eastern margins of the Brazilian Amazon, running from Maranhao and Tocantins through Para and Mato Grosso to Rondonia and Acre. It is not an administrative unit and has no legal boundary; it is a shape that appears when clearance is plotted, and it has held that shape for four decades because the things that determine it are stable - road access, distance to ports and slaughterhouses, land tenure that rewards possession, and the drier, more seasonal climate of the basin's southern edge, which makes both burning and mechanised agriculture easier there than in the wet core. The arc is also where the forest is least resilient to begin with: dry season length increases toward it, so the same clearance costs more function here than the same clearance in the northwest would.