Last month, a deeply divided Brazil voted to elect its next president. Faced with a choice between Fernando Haddad of the leftist Workers’ Party and the rightwing extremist Jair Bolsonaro, Brazilians chose the extremist — an outcome that will have far-reaching consequences for the environment, among other things.
With solid backing from the wealthiest 5 percent of Brazilians and rural landowners, Bolsonaro secured broader popular support by playing on people’s prejudices and fears.
In his campaign, he targeted vulnerable groups and pledged to reduce or eliminate protections for minorities, women and the poor.
Illustration: June Hsu
Meanwhile, he intends to loosen Brazil’s restrictive gun laws, claiming that allowing average citizens to arm themselves will stem rising crime.
As for the environment, Bolsonaro’s plans can be summed up in one word: exploitation.
For starters, he wants to reduce or eliminate environmental protections in the Amazon, the world’s largest tropical rainforest.
He intends to reduce substantially the protection of indigenous lands belonging to the descendants of the Amazon’s original inhabitants.
He also plans to ease environmental restrictions on the use of pesticides and on licensing for infrastructure development.
“Where there is indigenous land, there is wealth underneath it,” Bolsonaro once said.
With that in mind, he has declared that no more indigenous reserves will be demarcated, and existing reserves are to be opened up to mining.
Bolsonaro’s agenda will hasten environmental degradation dramatically.
Imazon, a Brazilian NGO, reported 444km2 of clearing in September, an 84 percent increase over September last year. The 12-month total amounts to 4,859km2, the highest level since July 2008.
Brazil’s national space research agency, INPE, also reports an uptick in deforestation — about 50 percent year on year in September.
As it stands, many of the farmers or loggers who exploit the Amazon do so illegally, risking fines or sanctions.
The expectation that the new government will not enforce laws prohibiting such activities is probably already emboldening them to intensify their activities.
Once those laws are weakened or abolished, deforestation can be expected to accelerate considerably. The government’s apparent inclination to boost activities like gold mining in the Amazon will only make matters worse.
There is little reason to believe that Bolsonaro will not be able to follow through on his destructive environmental agenda.
After all, far-right representatives allied with powerful business lobbies dominate Brazil’s new congress.
To make destroying the environment even easier, Bolsonaro has pledged to merge the environment and agriculture ministries, though he has since backtracked on this issue.
He is now looking for an environment minister who is allied with the ruralistas, or large landowners, and has appointed a minister of agriculture who wants to lift restrictions on the use of dangerous chemical products in agriculture.
Bolsonaro also promised during the election campaign to withdraw Brazil from the 2015 Paris climate agreement.
Alhough he has since backed away from that pledge, he has just appointed a climate-change-denying, anti-science diplomat as foreign minister.
That will present certain difficulties for Brazil’s bid to host the UN Climate Change Conference next year.
Beyond increasing the vulnerability of Brazil’s natural resources to commercial exploitation, the inevitable cuts to the environmental budget under Bolsonaro’s leadership will undermine the country’s ability to respond to disasters such as forest fires.
Brazil has already had an uptick in such fires — and fire-related destruction — owing to the expansion of agriculture, weaker oversight and surveillance, and the dismantling of fire brigades.
Bolsonaro’s plans will exacerbate the problem.
This is not the only problem that Bolsonaro’s agenda will worsen.
Socioeconomic inequality will increase. As the government hands more power over the rainforest to large business owners, ordinary citizens — including smallholder farmers and poor urban dwellers — are bound to suffer.
However, Brazil’s ecosystems matter for more than just that country — it is the guardian of the planet’s largest tropical rainforest, a repository of ecological services for the entire world, where most of the Earth’s biodiversity is concentrated.
The Amazon is home to more species of plants and animals than any other terrestrial ecosystem on the planet, and its rainfall and rivers feed much of South America.
Moreover, its hundreds of billions of trees store massive amounts of carbon.
Over the past 100 years, Brazil has reduced the Atlantic Forest by more than 90 percent, and cleared 50 percent of the Cerrado and almost 20 percent of the Amazon.
At a time when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is warning that we need to make urgent progress in reducing greenhouse-gas emissions, Bolsonaro’s plans will achieve just the opposite.
Unfortunately for Brazil and the rest of the world, there is no reason to believe that he cannot or will not implement them.
Paulo Artaxo is professor of environmental physics at the University of Sao Paulo, Brazil, and head of its applied physics department. He is an expert on the climatic effects of aerosols, particularly in Amazonia.
Copyright: Project Syndicate
Two sets of economic data released last week by the Directorate-General of Budget, Accounting and Statistics (DGBAS) have drawn mixed reactions from the public: One on the nation’s economic performance in the first quarter of the year and the other on Taiwan’s household wealth distribution in 2021. GDP growth for the first quarter was faster than expected, at 6.51 percent year-on-year, an acceleration from the previous quarter’s 4.93 percent and higher than the agency’s February estimate of 5.92 percent. It was also the highest growth since the second quarter of 2021, when the economy expanded 8.07 percent, DGBAS data showed. The growth
In the intricate ballet of geopolitics, names signify more than mere identification: They embody history, culture and sovereignty. The recent decision by China to refer to Arunachal Pradesh as “Tsang Nan” or South Tibet, and to rename Tibet as “Xizang,” is a strategic move that extends beyond cartography into the realm of diplomatic signaling. This op-ed explores the implications of these actions and India’s potential response. Names are potent symbols in international relations, encapsulating the essence of a nation’s stance on territorial disputes. China’s choice to rename regions within Indian territory is not merely a linguistic exercise, but a symbolic assertion
More than seven months into the armed conflict in Gaza, the International Court of Justice ordered Israel to take “immediate and effective measures” to protect Palestinians in Gaza from the risk of genocide following a case brought by South Africa regarding Israel’s breaches of the 1948 Genocide Convention. The international community, including Amnesty International, called for an immediate ceasefire by all parties to prevent further loss of civilian lives and to ensure access to life-saving aid. Several protests have been organized around the world, including at the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA) and many other universities in the US.
Every day since Oct. 7 last year, the world has watched an unprecedented wave of violence rain down on Israel and the occupied Palestinian Territories — more than 200 days of constant suffering and death in Gaza with just a seven-day pause. Many of us in the American expatriate community in Taiwan have been watching this tragedy unfold in horror. We know we are implicated with every US-made “dumb” bomb dropped on a civilian target and by the diplomatic cover our government gives to the Israeli government, which has only gotten more extreme with such impunity. Meantime, multicultural coalitions of US