Can the Amazon Survive Bolsonaro’s Reelection?

Toya Manchineri grew up in an Indigenous reserve in the Brazilian Amazon, where most people lived off the land by farming on small forest clearings and fishing in the rivers.

With a hint of nostalgia, the 54-year-old Indigenous leader says that this kind of lifestyle is becoming increasingly difficult to sustain, as wildcat gold mining operations pollute rivers and ranchers clear large swaths of the rainforest for cattle.

“Now animals and plants are becoming scarce,” said Manchineri, who was recently in New York to meet with climate activists and stage protests to coincide with the United Nations General Assembly. “The rivers are drying up, and our people don’t eat as well as they used to,” he told OZY.

Brazil is home to a third of the world’s rainforests. Its portion of the Amazon, which straddles nine countries in South America, has been under threat since the 1970s, when the nation’s military junta built roads into previously isolated areas and encouraged settlers to move in by promising them free land.

But the incremental deforestation of the Amazon has increased dramatically over the past three years due to President Bolsonaro’s aggressive efforts to build more roads, reduce oversight of agro-business, and undermine laws protecting Indigenous lands.

During the first eight months of 2022, Brazil lost more than 7,000 square kilometers (2,702 square miles) of rainforest, according to satellite images taken by its national space research agency. That’s an area almost ten times the size of New York City. The Amazon is now being deforested twice as fast as it was in 2018, the year before Bolsonaro was elected president.

Now, as the radical right-wing president tries to get reelected this weekend against his left-wing nemesis, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, some environmental leaders are warning that the Amazon might not survive a second Bolsonaro term.

If Bolsonaro gets another four years in office, environmentalists argue, the rainforest could get pushed past the tipping point, meaning entire swaths of the Amazon would no longer be able to generate enough rainfall to sustain themselves. Under that grim scenario, the trees and vegetation would wither and the jungle would turn to savannah — in other words, deforestation at a rate that all the bulldozers and chainsaws haven’t been able to achieve.

If the Amazon dries out, the so-called lungs of South America would no longer be able to act as an effective carbon sink for greenhouse gas emissions, thereby triggering a chain reaction of events that would have worldwide implications.

“We are entering a danger zone in the Amazon,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, a Brazilian environmental watchdog group. “This ballot is more than just about choosing a president. It’s about whether we are going to have the Amazon or whether we are going to have Bolsonaro. It’s impossible to have both.”

The Amazon basin gets much of its rain from clouds that form over the Atlantic Ocean. After rain falls on eastern parts of the Amazon, the jungle absorbs it and then releases water vapor back into the atmosphere, forming new clouds. Wind currents push those clouds and moisture toward the central Amazon and into the Andes Mountains, on the western side of South America.

But if there isn’t enough vegetation on the eastern side of the Amazon to absorb rain coming in off the Atlantic Ocean, the whole system falls apart.

While the exact tipping point is a matter of debate, a study published in 2018 said that once 20% to 25% of the Amazon has been cleared, parts of the southern, eastern and central Amazon will begin to turn to savannah. A more recent study published in September by the U.S.-based Monitoring of the Andean Amazon Project (MAAP), estimates that 13% of the Amazon’s original forest cover has already been lost, and that deforestation is as high as 30% in the eastern third of the rainforest, which is under greater pressure from cattle ranching and soy production. “That finding is critical,” the study says. “The tipping point will likely be triggered in the eastern Amazon.”

Astrini worries the Amazon could be pushed “faster than ever” toward its tipping point under a reelected Bolsonaro, who supports further eliminating red tape for those who want to set up plantations and extractive industries in the rainforest, while making it harder for environmental agencies to do their job. When Bolsonaro became president in 2019, he appointed a climate change denier as minister of the environment, and fired 17 of the 21 state heads of the environmental protection agency. The president then created a department to dismiss environmental fines, and has allowed large-scale landowners to register lands in Indigenous territories.

Under Bolsonaro’s watch, land invasions in Indigenous territories have increased as well as intentional forest fires set by settlers and land speculators who clear land and sell it to agriculture companies.

Requests by mining companies to operate in Indigenous lands increased by 91% during Bolsonaro’s first year in office, in anticipation of a new law announced by the president that would permit mining within protected territories (The bill is still under debate in Brazil’s congress.).

Brazil’s accelerating deforestation of the Amazon is increasingly becoming a problem for neighboring countries.

In the Colombian capital of Bogotá, which is located high in the Andes Mountains, authorities have warned that the city’s air is sometimes polluted with small carbon particles that come from Amazon forest fires in Brazil.

The particulate matter is dumped on the city by the same wind currents that also bring clouds and rainfall from the Amazon. And it was most recently detected in September by the city’s air monitoring system and by satellite images.

“This leaves us with a certain degree of frustration, because it is something we cannot control,” Carolina Urrutia, Bogotá’s secretary for the environment, told OZY. “On the other hand, it is yet another opportunity to show people how environmental problems are not isolated. Ecosystems know no borders.” Urrutia said Bogotá has been working to improve its air quality by buying 1,400 electric buses, expanding cycle lanes, planting trees and taking measures to limit the use of personal cars. But it needs its neighbor to act as a better steward to the Amazon, she stressed. “The decisions that Brazil makes are not only choices that are important for that country, but for the whole planet,” Urrutia said.

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For environmentalists there is some hope: Former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who managed to reduce deforestation during his two terms in office, is currently the favorite in Brazil’s presidential race, polling a few points shy of the 50% required to win the election in the first round.

Environmentalists and Indigenous groups have called on the leftist politician to step up efforts to demarcate Indigenous lands if he wins, and to strengthen protection agencies that have been stripped of power under Bolsonaro.

Franciso Ruiz, a sustainable development expert and former head of the Amazon Cooperation Treaty Organization, said the next government should also do more to support sustainable forestry management by communities living in the Amazon. “In many parts, the Amazon colonization and settlement have become irreversible,” Ruiz said. “So governments have to make pacts with communities to stop the agricultural frontier from expanding.”

For Indigenous leader Manchineri, the deforestation under Bolsonaro is a wakeup call to the country that elections have consequences. “We have to be careful about the representatives we elect,” he said. “Our resources are scarce, and if we destroy them we will die of hunger and thirst.”

If reelected, could Lula roll back some of the Amazon deforestation under President Bolsonaro, or has the damage to the rainforest already been done?