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On Sunday, Brazil elected a new president: Jair Bolsonaro. Bolsonaro was compared to President Donald Trump for his far-right policy. Like Trump, his election is a sign of dissatisfaction with the status quo in Brazil, but like Trump, his actions in areas such as the environment will have consequences that will spread around the world. In that, he could beat the President of the United States because he now governs an incomparable resource, the Amazon.
"There is really nothing Bolsonaro puts on the table that ecologists and scientists enjoy," says conservation biologist William Laurance of James Cook University in Australia.
Among its many controversial statements, Bolsonaro pledges to open indigenous lands to resource exploitation, to ban environmental NGOs such as the World Wildlife Fund, to place the Brazilian Ministry of Environment under the control of its Ministry of Environment. agriculture and to relax the laws protecting the development of the Amazon. Earlier in the electoral cycle, he threatened to revert to the Paris climate agreements, a position he has now relaxed. Staying in agreements will make more sense if all his election promises materialize.
Of course, the election promises are one thing and the measures taken in the offices are another. The problems related to the Amazon are important far beyond Brazil and they are related.
With regard to the environment, and more specifically the Amazon, the world is watching Bolsonaro closely. "It's a political entity, the federal government of Brazil, which controls 70% of the Amazon," said Emilio Bruna, an ecologist at the University of Florida who studies the # 39; Amazon. What Brazil decides to do with this territory has global implications.
Brazil is home to about 70 percent of the Amazon rainforest, one of the world's largest biodiversity sinks and a key carbon storage site. Protecting it is essential if we are to mitigate the effects of climate change and the associated mass extinction that is currently occurring. Deforestation rates have fallen to historic lows in 2012, but have since increased. With a government that is open to resource exploitation and actively hostile to conservation, this can be expected to continue.
A sign of the times is the fact that Bolsonaro is considering dismantling the government's environmental ministry and placing it under the responsibility of the Ministry of Agriculture, says Bruna. "Obviously, [these two ministries] have different teams and objectives, and in fact, the Ministry of the Environment is also responsible for enforcing environmental legislation, "he said. This includes things like controlling farmers to make sure they are not illegally clearing land to grow soybeans or livestock. "By integrating the Ministry of Environment into the Ministry of Agriculture, this really tells you what their priorities are," he says.
But to simply consider deforestation in terms of the impact on the climate leaves aside some of the most important actors of Brazilian politics, people for whom the Amazon is not only a jewel of the planet, it is his homeland .
"This scenario is totally heartbreaking," says Dinamã Tuxá, coordinator of the Association of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB), in a press release from the Amazon Watch organization. "Bolsonaro has made clear and consistent statements about the end of indigenous property rights, completely opposed to our rights."
Bolsanaro described the Amazon as "a child with chicken pox," comparing native reserves to diseased lesions. Ending indigenous property rights and opening up their lands to mining activities were among the promises of his campaign. He also spoke about the expansion of nuclear and hydroelectric power in the Amazon – which means more dams, some of which will displace indigenous peoples.
Indigenous Peoples of the Amazon play a vital role in protecting the rainforest and monitoring progress of illegal deforestation. But beyond their usefulness in protecting the area, it's their home. Removing the protections protecting the Amazon also undermines their most basic rights.
An APIB statement released Oct. 22 calls on the human rights community at the national and international levels to "remain vigilant in order to protect our lives as well as the rights guaranteed by the federal constitution and by the international treaties signed by Brazil ".
Native reserves have "traditional protected areas really increased considerably" in the Amazon, Laurance says. With these environmentally protected protected areas and government-controlled logging sites, they create conservation corridors through crucial parts of the jungle, he said. Removing electricity from indigenous reserves – many of which are not fully defined, making them politically vulnerable – would fragment these corridors and leave only much less effective areas for wildlife conservation.
"Many of the indigenous reserves in the Amazon are about to undergo a lot of development pressure," he says. Let us take a development chair who is explicitly threatening aboriginal self-government and who knows what might happen.
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