Scientists are terrified that Brazil's new president will destroy the 'lungs of the planet'
- On Sunday, Brazil elected the far-right presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro.
- Scientists across the globe are worried about Bolsonaro’s plans.
- Bolsonaro has indicated he wants to plow through Brazil’s Amazon, the Earth’s biggest and most diverse tropical rainforest, which helps cool the planet.
31
October, 2018
Jair
Bolsonaro, Brazil’s far-right presidential candidate,swept
the polls on Sunday to win the election.
“Brazilians
are exhausted by corruption, by rising violence, by an economy that
just hasn’t improved,” and Bolsonaro has made a lot of promises
to fix those things, according to Peter Prengaman, The
Associated Press’ Brazil news director.
Bolsonaro, who
has been called the “Trump of the Tropics” and
has a history of making
anti-gay, misogynistic,violent,
and racistcomments,
is also taking aim at the country’s environmental policies. And
scientists across the globe are worried.
As
Brazil’s president, Bolsonaro will control nearly two-thirds of the
Amazon, the largest tropical rainforest on Earth. He has argued that
too many environmentally protected areas are hampering the country’s
development.
Bolsonaro
has said he’s thinking about opening up a highway through the
Amazon and barring environmental nongovernmental organisations like
Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund from the country, The
Guardian reported earlier this month.
Bolsonaro plans to cut down more of the world’s largest tropical rainforest, and critics fear he’ll ‘institutionalize genocide’ in the Amazon
Bolsonaro
recently promised
reporters that Brazil would stay in the Paris agreement,
the landmark global climate deal he has been critical of in the past.
But it’s unclear how he’d uphold Brazil’s end of that deal
while simultaneously cutting down large swaths of the Amazon, which
helps keep the world cool.
Bolsonaro
has also indicated he plans to eliminate Brazil’s Ministry of the
Environment, Science
magazine reported.
“His
reckless plans to industrialize the Amazon in concert with Brazilian
and international agribusiness and mining sectors will bring untold
destruction to the planet’s largest rainforest and the communities
who call it home and spell disaster for the global climate,”
Christian Poirier, the program director of Amazon Watch, said
in a statement after
Bolsonaro’s election.
Poirier
isn’t the only one who’s concerned.
“I
think we are headed for a very dark period in the history of Brazil,”
Paulo Artaxo, a climate change researcher at the University of Sao
Paulo in Brazil, told
Science.
“There is no point sugarcoating it. Bolsonaro is the worst thing
that could happen for the environment.”
Genevieve
Guenther, who founded EndClimateSilence.org, said
on Twitter that
Bolsonaro’s election “guarantees that Brazil will do nothing to
curb pollution emission and untold acres of the Amazon rainforest
will be destroyed,” while the meteorologist Eric
Holthaus argued that a
forest-privatization scheme that the new president has in mind is
essentially “planetary suicide.”
Other
scientists, like
Jess Phoenix,
a volcanologist who ran in a Democratic primary race in Southern
California over the summer, agreed.
Some
indigenous people who live in the forest said they feared that more
loggers and miners could head toward their homes under Bolsonaro.
“We
are very scared. I fear for my own life,” Dinaman Tuxa, the
national coordinator of Brazil’s Association of Indigenous
Peoples, said
in an interview with Brazil de Facto,
adding that Bolsonaro would “institutionalize genocide.”
Christopher
Dick, a tropical-plant expert at the University of Michigan, said
on Twitter that
if Bolsonaro “carries through on his rhetoric we can expect tribal
genocide, torture of dissidents, and climate altering destruction of
Amazon forest.”
“This
is a nightmare scenario,” he added. “I hope I am wrong.”
The Amazon is literally breathing life into the planet
Plants
in the rainforest suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, use the
carbon to grow, and release oxygen back into the air. This is why the
Amazon, which covers 2.1 million square miles, is
often referred to as the “lungs of the planet.”
The
forest helps our spinning ball breathe carbon dioxide in and exhale
oxygen back out, performing a critical check on human-fuelled climate
change. Scientists have estimated that the
Amazon may house one-sixth of the carbon stored in
vegetation around the world.
Environmental
experts argue that this carbon-sucking system is one of the best
solutions we have for climate change.
“We
have to take carbon dioxide basically out of the atmosphere in order
to prevent a very dangerous increase in temperature, and major
increases in floods, severe storms, and heat waves,” Doug Boucher,
a science adviser at the Union of Concerned Scientists,told
Grist magazine earlier this month.
“The best way we know to take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere
is to preserve and rebuild forests.”
Though
the Amazon is the
most diverse forest on the planet,
scientists say that less than 0.5% of its flowering plant species
have been studied for their medicinal
potential, according
to the WWF.
Adamning
new report the organisation released Tuesday said
it found that “a fifth of the Amazon has disappeared in just 50
years.”
As
Brazil has raced to keep pace with demand for more beef and soybean
production, pieces of the Amazon the size of entire countries have
been cleared. In one
particularly intense tree-cutting period from 1991 to 2000,
an area the size of Spain was cut down. That rapid pace of
deforestation has slowed in recent years, though the trend of trading
trees for livestock and agriculture is expected
to continue.
Even
though Amazonian
soil is not good for farming,
scientists estimate
that an area the size of Delaware,
or more
than 1,900 square miles,
was bulldozed through last year, and they expect that to rise under
Bolsonaro.
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