The Amazon gets less and less green

Despite the alarms about global warming, the news concerning Brazil’s crucial Amazon jungle is not good. Once again, satellites are showing deforestation is on the rise. And once again the government has announced a package of measures aimed at halting it. If you think you’ve heard this story before, you’re not wrong. It’s depressingly familiar. “This is only a surprise if you believe in Father Christmas,” said Roberto Smeraldi, director of Friends of the Earth’s Brazil office.

The new statistics show that deforestation for the last five months of 2007 was 3,235 sq. kilometers (1,250 sq. miles or about the size of Rhode Island), a rise from the previous year’s figure and alarming because deforestation normally drops in the final rainy months of the year. In a world panicked by its own carbon footprint, the forests of the Amazon are the planet’s largest absorber of carbon dioxide.

Adapted from “The Amazon gets less and less green”

Available at <http://www.ecoearth.info/shared/reader/welcome.aspx?linkid=92021&keybold=Amazon visited on June 26, 2009.

Considering the use of the linking word DESPITE in the sentence: “Despite the alarms about global warming, the news concerning Brazil’s crucial Amazon jungle is not good” and the possible forms of the item, which of the following sentences IS NOT correct?