Tropical forests are protected

Environmental advocates say Para Simao Jatene's decision is one of the most important environmental initiatives in recent years.

It will help combat theft of timber as well as indiscriminate land exploitation, which has devastated many of the Amazon river delta.

Protected forest area is about 16 million hectares (Photo: Flickr)

Mr. Russell Mittermeier, President of Conservation International, said if any tropical forest survived, it was the northern Amazonia region, thanks to the governor's initiative.

Protection corridor

Nine new areas will be in conservation, and they will link existing areas to form a large corridor in the northern Amazon Delta. This corridor, known as the Guyana Shield, extends from Guyana, Surinam and French Guiana to Brazil.

This area is considered to be of primary importance for conservation because it accounts for more than 25% of the global rainforest area. Nearly 90% of Guyana's shield area is not passive and there is also the largest freshwater reserve in the whole of America: 20% of all freshwater in the continent runs through here.

Since 1970, more than 600,000 square kilometers of Amazon jungle, an area larger than France, has been devastated.

Conservation International says that with the current rate of deforestation, the entire Amazon region will be threatened with destruction by 2050, seriously affecting the global climate because it is considered the world's lung.