What about the Amazon?: The lung of America is also at stake in the Brazilian elections

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A week ago, when the Brazilian journalist Claudia Gaigher visited the State of Pará, on the border with Mato Grosso, she found a bleak scene.

“I witnessed the disaster that left a fire in 12,000 hectares of native forest, of which 6,000 were in a conservation unit,” she says.

It is an image that is no longer unusual, because in recent years, she explains, "an orchestrated action of devastation has been carried out in the Amazon to destroy it by the edges."

While Brazil managed to reduce its deforestation by 80% between 2004 and 2012, much of the period in which Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was president (2003-2011), the destruction of forests reached its peak during the Government of Jair Bolsonaro.

According to the National Institute for Space Research of Brazil (INPE), forest loss in the Amazon has been so rapid that, in 2021, with 13,265 kilometers of forest devastated, the highest record in 15 years was reached.

Between 2020 and 2021, the equivalent of 17 cities like New York disappeared.

For this reason, the battle for the presidency of Brazil between Lula and Bolsonaro, which is approaching a final chapter with the first electoral round this Sunday, is also a battle for the Amazon and, with this, for the fate of the lung of America.

Brazil has 60% of the Amazon biome in its territory, which is considered key to mitigating and adapting to climate change.

Without the Amazon standing, the promises, the international treaties and the climatic probabilities to avoid a temperature increase of more than 1.5°C by the end of the century would also be dismantled, a figure that the countries agreed to strive not to exceed with the Agreement of Paris signed in 2015.

“Although studies are still being carried out, it is estimated that Bolsonaro's reelection could imply a loss of forest that is between 60,000 and 100,000 square kilometers over four years.

That means pushing the Amazon to a turning point,” says Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian Climate Observatory.

Astrini, along with other scientists and environmental organizations, sees the possibility of a new Bolsonaro term as the worst possible scenario for the region.

During the last four years, researchers have seen how the Government dismantled several successful environmental policies: the environmental budget was reduced, the

was frozen - a fund established in 2008 in which Brazil received from Germany and Norway donations of up to 1 .2 billion dollars to protect the Amazon - and the doors were opened to part of the agro-industrial sector so that they could deforest without major consequences.

Environmental fines were made more flexible.

“On average, in the three years of the Bolsonaro government, the number of infraction acts for crimes against flora was 2,963 in the nine states that make up the Legal Amazon, a number that is 40% lower than the average for the decade. prior to the current Government (4,624)”, warns the document

developed by the Climate Observatory.

And although the Bolsonaro government plan dedicates a chapter to "strengthening the control and inspection of illegal burning, deforestation and environmental crimes", and another to the "defense, protection and promotion of sustainable development of the Amazon", scientists see it skeptically.

“These are difficult words to believe, because you cannot say that some money is going to be put into the forests, when what has been done is to relax and promote deforestation,” says Paulo Barreto, a researcher at the Amazonian Institute of People and Environment (Imazon).

But with Lula in the presidency, they believe, there would be more hopeful signs.

During his government, for example, the program against deforestation was developed jointly between the Ministry of the Environment and the Chief of Staff so that the 13 ministries were involved and the problem's urgency scale was raised.

Faced with the new that Lula could bring to the table, Suely Araújo, senior expert in Climate Policy at the Climate Observatory and former president of the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (Ibama), assures that "there would be an important advance if the candidate accepts and incorporates the document given to him by his former Environment Minister, Marina Silva”.

What Araújo is referring to is a document that Silva delivered to the candidate on September 12, in which proposals such as low-carbon agriculture, the delimitation of new indigenous lands, reinvigorating environmental agencies and creating more conservation units, among others.

If these proposals are integrated, Lula's plan would go from fulfilling three socio-environmental commitments to 13, according to an analysis by the Climate Observatory that took into account 25 points.

But the context of the world that elected Lula in 2002 and 2006 and Bolsonaro in 2018 is not the same as the current one.

Climate demands are now much stronger.

"The pressures are increasing on the private sector," says Barreto.

"We had a case in which one of the largest meat companies in the country - which is one of the sectors most associated with deforestation in Brazil - was negotiating a loan with a multilateral bank."

But since the company could not demonstrate that its supply chain did not guarantee zero deforestation, the discussion was put on hold.

“People are increasingly concerned about climate change and willing to invest to conserve a forest.

If a new government sees those opportunities, the world would be willing to invest”, he assures.