“Coronavirus could wipe us out,” warned Ianucula Kaiabi, an indigenous leader in Brazil’s Xingu national park, a sprawling sanctuary on the southern fringes of the Amazon that is home to about 6,000 people from 16 different tribes.
With Brazil’s death toll hitting 136 on Sunday, Xingu leaders have been sealing off roads into their reserve, which is almost the size of Belgium, and urging local residents to leave only in emergencies.”
ACCURACY: FAIR. Xingu N.P is 10.2 million sq miles. Belgium is 11.8. Rwanda would have been a better comparison.
Some convoluted arithmetic appeared in an AFP UK report which was published on Yahoo News (and others).
Chile is one of the world’s main glacier reserves, with gigantic ice blocks covering almost three percent of the national territory. That’s more than 20,000km², which is about two thirds the size of Belgium.
“In the northwest corner of the country, bordered on two sides by the Atlantic and separated from Portugal by the Miño river, it is roughly the size of Belgium – about 180 miles from north to south.”
This is a very good comparison, as Galicia is about 96% the size of Belgium.
Reported on EarthSky.org … Roughly the same size of Belgium, Canada’s Great Slave Lake runs nearly 2,000 feet (600 meters) deep. This article from NASA Earth Observatory describes the lake and conditions around it in 2019.
[Editor’s Note: At 27,200 km2 Great Slave Lake is approximately 90% the size of Belgium]
The Australian weekly “The Saturday Paper (May 23, 2019)” must be confident that its readers are familiar with the size of Belgium despite it being on the other side of the planet …
” the Ngarrawanji people of the east Kimberley have won a decades-long fight for native title over their traditional lands…
… Native title claims covering an area the size of Belgium will be decided upon this week as the Federal Court moves through the east Kimberley, with Malarngowem and Yurriyangem Taam traditional owners set to hear their determinations today. “
According to an article from the World Economic Forum the sea ice in the Arctic is disappearing, and there is a strong correlation with CO2 (carbon dioxide) emissions. For every metric ton of CO2 we add to the atmosphere, we lose another three square meters of sea ice.
The article states that China’s emissions in 2017 were “10.0 Gt CO2 = 30,000 km2 sea ice loss (more than 10 times the size of Hong Kong or approximately the size of Belgium) “
Here is a perfect example of the mysterious allure of Belgium as a unit of measurement.
“Today is the start of my listening tour across the Barwon electorate. The gravity of the task ahead is not lost on me. This electorate is the largest in New South Wales, covering more than 40 per cent of the state. It’s eleven times the size of Belgium.”
This is a quote by Roy Butler, a politician in Australia, about as far from Belgium as you can get.
It is published in a local Australian newspaper(the Nyngan Observer) whose readers are not likely to be familiar with the size of Belgium.
The area in question (the political district of Barwon) is very nearly the size of Germany, while Belgium is 11 times smaller.
WHY DID HE CHOOSE TO COMPARE IT WITH BELGIUM INSTEAD OF GERMANY? That is the issue that motivated me to start this web site many years ago.
From a piece by the Director of the Forestry Department, Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations …
“Imagine an area the size of Belgium, blanketed by forests and trees which provide food, fuel, medicine, shelter, and incomes for local habitants while conserving soil and water for farms and absorbing carbon from the atmosphere.
Now, imagine that area stripped entirely of its trees. This is the amount of forest area lost to the world each year.”
Catalonia’s move towards independence from Spain has been making news for several weeks. If the campaign succeeds in creating a new nation, Catalonia (32,108 sq km) will be roughly the size of Belgium (30,528).
According to an article from Thomson Reuters Trust, “Russia’s five largest landowners together now control an area the size of Belgium after expanding rapidly to increase domestic production of foods on banned imports lists, including beef and chicken, according to Moscow-based consultants BEFL.“