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
Concerns that the US might abandon Taiwan are often overstated. While US President Donald Trump’s handling of Ukraine raised unease in Taiwan, it is crucial to recognize that Taiwan is not Ukraine. Under Trump, the US views Ukraine largely as a European problem, whereas the Indo-Pacific region remains its primary geopolitical focus. Taipei holds immense strategic value for Washington and is unlikely to be treated as a bargaining chip in US-China relations. Trump’s vision of “making America great again” would be directly undermined by any move to abandon Taiwan. Despite the rhetoric of “America First,” the Trump administration understands the necessity of
In an article published on this page on Tuesday, Kaohsiung-based journalist Julien Oeuillet wrote that “legions of people worldwide would care if a disaster occurred in South Korea or Japan, but the same people would not bat an eyelid if Taiwan disappeared.” That is quite a statement. We are constantly reading about the importance of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co (TSMC), hailed in Taiwan as the nation’s “silicon shield” protecting it from hostile foreign forces such as the Chinese Communist Party (CCP), and so crucial to the global supply chain for semiconductors that its loss would cost the global economy US$1
US President Donald Trump’s challenge to domestic American economic-political priorities, and abroad to the global balance of power, are not a threat to the security of Taiwan. Trump’s success can go far to contain the real threat — the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) surge to hegemony — while offering expanded defensive opportunities for Taiwan. In a stunning affirmation of the CCP policy of “forceful reunification,” an obscene euphemism for the invasion of Taiwan and the destruction of its democracy, on March 13, 2024, the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) used Chinese social media platforms to show the first-time linkage of three new
Sasha B. Chhabra’s column (“Michelle Yeoh should no longer be welcome,” March 26, page 8) lamented an Instagram post by renowned actress Michelle Yeoh (楊紫瓊) about her recent visit to “Taipei, China.” It is Chhabra’s opinion that, in response to parroting Beijing’s propaganda about the status of Taiwan, Yeoh should be banned from entering this nation and her films cut off from funding by government-backed agencies, as well as disqualified from competing in the Golden Horse Awards. She and other celebrities, he wrote, must be made to understand “that there are consequences for their actions if they become political pawns of