Last week, several studies warned that the destruction of the most precious ecosystem on planet Earth, the Amazon rainforest, is advancing at a much faster pace than previously calculated. Savage forestry and mining exploration, the advance of agricultural and ranching settlers into the vast jungle, devastating fires, and a long series of dry seasons severely degraded more than a third of this area of the world in the first two decades of the century. .
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According to research from the State University of Campinas, in the state of São Paulo, fire, indiscriminate felling of forests and colonization activities significantly deteriorated, between 2001 and 2018, about 365,000 square kilometers, equivalent to 5.5 percent of the jungle territory at the beginning of the century.
But when adding the effects of the long series of droughts that have struck the region, the damaged area rises to 2.5 million square kilometers, equivalent to more than a third of the surface that the Amazon covered in 2000. To get an idea of the size of the disaster, 2.5 million km² is more than twice the territory of Colombia.
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What happens in this region of seven million square kilometers that integrates nine countries, the main one being Brazil, is both a cause and a consequence of climate change. The deterioration of the forest could lead, in a few years, to the Amazon stopping to clean the planetary atmosphere, by absorbing less carbon dioxide (CO2) than it emits, which would further accelerate global warming. But, at the same time, drought –the main cause of this deterioration– is a consequence of climate change. Typical vicious circle: the deterioration of the Amazon aggravates climate change and, due to droughts, climate change deteriorates this formidable jungle.
Hence, all hopes are placed on the new president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who has just started his third term, after the two consecutive ones he had between 2003 and 2011, with two main promises: end hunger that affects 33 million Brazilians and stop the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. The complexity of the panorama is that moving in both directions at the same time can be conflictive.
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Much of the pressure that destroys the forests originates from tens of thousands of starving peasant families who, initially encouraged by the government in the 1980s, colonized a long strip in the south and southeast of the gigantic jungle to plant, raise cattle, extract wood and exploit small mines. After the increase in poverty due to the covid-19 pandemic and the slowdown of the Brazilian economy in recent years, this pressure was reactivated.
the size of the disaster
The Amazon is home to a third of all known plant species. There are nearly 400,000 million trees that contribute, as no other region does, to maintaining the balance in the Earth’s carbon and water cycles. This monumental vegetation absorbs more than a quarter of the carbon and other greenhouse gases (those that raise temperatures) produced.
The problem is that, due to human activity, the immense Amazonian system has begun to produce disproportionate amounts of carbon dioxide. In 2021, some studies indicated that the production of CO2 was already higher than what the forest absorbed. But these figures were reassessed and now there is a certain consensus that the Amazon continues to clean the atmosphere more than it dirty it.
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In any case, if the degradation continues, the less CO2 the Amazon digests, the greater the deterioration of the atmosphere, the greater the global warming and the more catastrophic the consequences of climate change.
“Without these forests, one of the lungs of the planet that absorbs between 25 and 30 percent of the greenhouse gases emitted by humans, climate change would be much worse,” says Jean-Pierre Wigneron, a researcher at Inrae, French institute that fights for sustainable agriculture.
For Wigneron, deforestation is the phenomenon that most seriously impacts the Amazon rainforest. The search for new areas for cultivation and livestock, in many cases by families in need, uncontrolled logging and illegal mining, among other causes, drive the felling of forests.
At the turn of the century, the region was losing nearly 25,000 square kilometers of forest every year. By 2012, the pace slowed to just under 5,000 km². But between 2019 and 2021, under right-wing President Jair Bolsonaro, deforestation accelerated again to more than 10,000 km² per year.
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Between August 2019 and July 2020 alone, satellite tracking and on-the-ground investigations concluded that more than 11,000 kilometers of forests were destroyed. According to what the French newspaper Le Monde said at the time: “This rate implies ending the equivalent of 4,300 football fields per day, three per minute”. By mid-2021, the annual rate of destruction continued to rise, with more than 13,000 km². And the first estimates for 2022 point to similar indicators.
In 2019 and 2020, the great fires that caused worldwide alarm broke out. But in addition, the construction of an endless highway in the state of Pará generated debate, which implied not only the forest destruction derived from the work, but the arrival of thousands more settlers to the borders and the interior of the Amazon.
More than 99,000 sources of fire –many of them human-initiated– were detected by satellites in 2020, against 88,000 in 2019. And this in the midst of the pandemic, when Brazil was one of the few countries that increased its CO2 emissions, while the vast majority stopped them due to confinement, less use of transport and the decline in industrial activity.
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There are many experts who fear that an irreversible collapse of the Amazon is close, with the definitive disappearance of more than a quarter of what were its forests until a few decades ago, causing a devastating effect for the planet as a whole.
“A clear degradation of the forest is already evident, which is hotter, drier and more vulnerable, with rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall,” says Antonio Oviedo, from the Socio-environmental Institute (ISA) in Brazil.
The challenge for Lula
In November, two months before taking office for the third time, Lula proclaimed: “The most urgent commitment is to end hunger.” During the first decade of the century, and thanks in large part to the boom in oil exports, but also in exports of soybeans, corn and other agricultural products, Lula was able to invest enormous amounts of reais in increasing jobs and subsidies, and thus reduce poverty and hunger.
Some 30 million Brazilians came out of poverty in those years. About 50 million when the leader of the Workers’ Party first arrived at the Planalto Palace in Brasilia. But the brake on the export boom during the second decade of the century and the devastating effects of the covid-19 pandemic raised the number of poor people from 19 million in 2020 to more than 30 million., according to the most recent figures. That is the size of Lula’s challenge.
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A clear degradation of the forest is already evident, which is hotter, drier and more vulnerable, with rising temperatures and decreasing rainfall.
Apart from the good international prices, due to the grain and cereal export boom of those years, it was due to the policy of promoting agro-industry, in states like Minas Gerais, outside the Amazon. This program, which involved expanding the agricultural frontier by hundreds of thousands of hectares, made Brazil the third largest producer of food in the world and the first in animal protein.
But some connoisseurs consider that, in order to sustain and even increase this bet, and thus return to the path of reducing poverty, Lula will not be able to cut short the agro-industrial advance. And this advance may imply a new threat on the borders of the Amazon.
As happened to Bolsonaro, his successor will feel international pressure in defense of the Amazon rainforest. But like every Brazilian leader, Lula has a nationalist side that makes him resistant to foreign interference.
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From the outset and aware of how difficult it will be to reverse the trend in the Amazon, Lula, aware of grounding expectations in terms of environmental measures, does not speak of ending deforestation but of “stopping its progress”, and in terms of the mining on land, talks about eliminating it but above all “in indigenous territories”.
In 2011, Lula left the presidency with popularity ratings above 80 percent. But the corruption scandals that were uncovered later, and that touched him directly, led him to win the presidential elections with just 50.9 percent of the vote against Bolsonaro’s 49.1 percent. For this reason, he not only governs a polarized Brazil, but to pass laws in Congress he will have to agree with center and center-right parties, since the left that supports him is a minority in the Legislature.
Needing a broader popular base of support than the one that elected him, he will no doubt be forced to aim much harder at reducing poverty and hunger. Hopefully that does not mean that his promises to save the Amazon remain on a second level, because the survival of the largest lung on the planet depends to a large extent on it.
MAURICIO VARGAS
FOR THE TIME[email protected]
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