A spokesperson for the German government, the fund’s second-biggest donor, told Climate Home that support for such a project “is not possible” according to the rules of the fund, which was specifically set up to reduce forest destruction in the Amazon.

The United States is “confident” the fund will use its resources “consistent with its governing regulations”, a US State Department spokesperson told Climate Home.

Environmentalists fear the project would trigger an explosion in forest destruction by giving illegal loggers easier access to remote areas of the rainforest.

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Investment in large-scale infrastructure projects is not listed among the target actions of the 2008 presidential decree that established how the fund should spend its money.

But officials in the Lula administration want to tap the green funds for the paving of the 900-kilometre long BR-319 highway, cutting through the rainforest and connecting Manaus and Porto Velho.

The lower house of the Brazilian Congress voted last December in favour of a bill that would allow for the use of conservation funds to finance public works aimed at “recovering, paving and increasing the capacity” of the road. The bill needs Senate approval before becoming law.

The German government said it “is observing the developments closely”. A spokesperson added that, if the bill was conclusively approved, the German government would affirm to the Amazon Fund’s managers that its resources cannot be used to pave the road.

‘Tremendous consequences’

Research shows every major highway project in the Amazon has set off a surge in land grabbing and illegal deforestation.

Philip Fearnside, a scientist at the National Institute for Amazonian Research in Manaus, told Climate Home “the consequences would be tremendous”.

He added that trees would not only be cleared on the roadside, but the project would create an interconnected network of major roads giving deforesters access to a much larger area.

Built in the 1970s by a military government, the BR-319 was abandoned a decade later due to a lack of maintenance.

Since disintegrated into a dirt road, much of the route is now impassable during the rainy season. Vehicles that attempt it during dry months crawl along the broken pavement.

A section of BR-319 in the Amazonas state of Brazil. Photo: Agencia CNT de Noticias

The Brazilian government has been sketching out plans to restore the highway on economic and social development grounds.

The transport minister, Renan Filho, announced last August that he was planning to pitch the Amazon Fund’s governing board a project to pave the road.

This would turn the road into the world’s “most sustainable highway” and would allow easier access for police patrols to monitor and prevent deforestation, the ministry argued.

But environmentalists argued that this is not the kind of project that the fund is meant to support. One of the fund’s creators, forest scientist Tasso Azevedo said the project “does not fit into any of the fund’s planned support lines”.

Amazon Fund revived

Created in 2008, the Amazon Fund has over $1.2 billion available for projects that prevent, monitor and combat deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon. The fund’s largest donors are Norway, Germany, the US, Switzerland and state-owned oil company Petrobras.

They have promised to inject an extra $800 million into the fund since President Lula revived the mechanism on his first day in office in 2023 after three years of inactivity.

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Western donors had stopped money transfers in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

The Brazilian Development Bank (BNDES) manages the fund and decides how to allocate its resources.

Last September it told Climate Home that any requests are processed “in accordance with the strategic vision, guidelines and focuses” outlined in the 2023-25 ​​Biennium, a new set of guidelines created by the Amazon Fund’s Guiding Committee. It has not replied to further requests for comment.

Donors sceptical over plans

A spokesperson for Germany’s Ministry for cooperation and development, said the use of Amazon Fund resources “is clearly defined and restricted” by the presidential decree underpinning the fund’s creation. “Based on these rules and regulations, the use of financial resources for paving a road through the rainforest is not possible”, they added.

A US State Department spokesperson said they “are confident” the BNDES will use the fund’s resources “consistent with its governing regulations and Brazil’s public commitment to cease all deforestation in the Legal Amazon by 2030”.

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A spokesperson for the Norwegian embassy in Brazil said it is for the Brazilian government through BNDES to decide on the specific use of the resources in the Amazon Fund. “The Norwegian Government has no say in the selection of projects”, it added.

The Brazilian government controls BNDES and appoints its head. “It is not an independent institution and the government has put pressure on its decisions in the past”, says Fearnside. “It just depends on how high a priority the project is for the government. The indication is that, except for the Ministry of Environment, the rest of the government is in favour of this highway”.

Fast-tracking process

Meanwhile, a group of parliamentarians from the Amazon regions brought a new bill to Congress aiming to fast-track the construction project. The text, approved under a special ‘urgency’ procedure, calls the highway “critical infrastructure, indispensable to national security”. 

The bill would authorize the use of donations received by Brazil to help conservation of the Amazon for the repair works on BR-319.

“We want a road that gives us the right to go back and forth, to transport goods, to buy food. This is the only highway in Brazil that is not paved, we cannot treat people from the North as second-class citizens”, said Alberto Neto, the author of the bill, after its approval in the lower chamber.  

The article was updated on 11/01 to add a comment received after publication

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Federal Police have joined the government’s biodiversity conservation agency ICMBio on a series of recent operations to catch illegal gold miners and destroy their camps and equipment.

Gold mining is a small but growing contributor to the cutting down of the Amazon rainforest, reducing its ability to suck up greenhouse gas.

Leftist President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s government has already been cracking down on mining on Indigenous reservations.

But that has pushed some miners to other forests where there has been little enforcement.

Wildcat gold miners are briefly detained and questioned at an illegal gold mine (REUTERS/Adriano Machado/File Photo)

This month, armed officers of ICMBio, a government agency named after murdered environmental activist Chico Mendes, swooped down in helicopters on wildcat camps in the upper reaches of the Tapajos, a tributary of the Amazon River.

They set fire to barges used to pump and filter ore, destroyed excavators and chainsaws, and seized weapons, radios and scales used by miners to weigh their gold.

Lula has vowed to stamp out illegal mining and end deforestation by 2030. That is a sharp reversal of policy from his predecessor Jair Bolsonaro, who was criticized globally for relaxing environmental controls, giving illegal loggers and miners free range in the Amazon. He argued that Brazil had the right to develop its natural resources.

On one recent mission, a Reuters photographer followed an ICMBio team into the Urupadi National Forest where agents detained a handful of wildcat miners and destroyed their tents, excavators, dredging equipment and fuel supplies.

Brazil lawmakers approve using green fund to pave road through Amazon rainforest

The miners had cut down swathes of jungle and dug dozens of ponds to dredge for gold that they separated from sand and ore with mercury, a contaminant that poisons fish in the rivers.

Through the open door of their incoming helicopter, the ICMBio agents fired automatic weapons at motor boats carrying fleeing miners. They fired again to blow up barrels of diesel fuel and set fire to excavators so they could not be used again.

“We destroy their camps and they keep coming back,” said mission commander Sidney Serafim.

During a three-week operation, the agents found 20 mining sites and 11 clandestine airstrips in the forest, along with kilos of mercury and thousands of liters of diesel.

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Detained miner Fabio Santos said he had worked prospecting for gold in Munduruku territory further along the Tapajos river, but had moved out due to law enforcement missions and conflict with the Indigenous people.

“We thought it would be quieter here. Bolsonaro did not destroy our equipment,” he said.

“Things are going downhill with the new government,” said another miner, Ramon Marques. “God left the gold here for us to enjoy it,” he added.

The men were set free into the jungle on foot. Only the manager of one of the wildcat mining sites, Manuel de Jesus Silva, was taken into police custody.

He ran a store in a wooden shack where he sold canned food and liquor to the miners for grams of gold, and had a snooker table outside for them to play.

“I used to make 200 grams a month, but in the last two months I got just 100 grams,” Silva complained.

The post Brazil cracks down on illegal gold miners appeared first on Climate Home News.

Its supporters claim it has been doing exceptionally well. The Cambodian government hailed it as the “most successful” community-based forest conservation scheme on the carbon market and a climate solution.

Satellite images tell a different story. Tumring is experiencing dramatic deforestation, losing over 22% of trees in the project area since the scheme began. The Cambodian government does not account for this loss in official monitoring reports.

Nor is this an isolated case. In a joint investigation, Climate Home and Unearthed, Greenpeace UK’s investigative journalism unit, found similar discrepancies in two Brazilian projects, based on data from two different satellite monitoring platforms. Companies like Uber, ArcelorMittal and Marathon are still using credits from these three projects to offset their emissions – and there is nothing to stop them.

It raises serious questions for Verra, the largest standard setter in the voluntary carbon market, which oversees the projects.

Project owners disputed the findings, while Verra said it “is committed to refining and improving its methodologies based on the best available science and data”.

Mind the gap

By protecting trees the Tumring project generates carbon credits – or offsets – which are then used by polluters to compensate for their own emissions elsewhere. Texan oil firm Marathon is a major buyer, while the Cambodian and Korean governments, project partners, are planning to use a portion of the credits as part of their national net zero plans.

But the emissions avoided through the project are likely to be overstated given the deforestation rate appears to be higher than claimed. Project owners recorded just 3,450 hectares (ha) of forest loss in monitoring reports between 2015 and 2019, the most recent data submitted. Our analysis using the online tool Global Forest Watch showed forest loss was four times higher in that period, at 14,000 ha.

Climate Home and Unearthed looked at offsetting projects after a source raised concerns about apparent discrepancies between what project owners were declaring in their monitoring reports, and what could be seen through satellite images.

The team compared project filings with data developed by the University of Maryland and made available on the Global Forest Watch online platform. A second source of satellite data, Forobs, developed by the European Commission’s Joint Research Centre, was used to check the findings. This showed a similar trend.

Redd+ weaknesses

Verra is a major proponent of the UN-backed scheme Redd+, which stands for “reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation in developing countries”. It is designed to protect areas at risk of being deforested. Companies can buy carbon credits from these projects to discount their own emissions.

Critics have long raised concerns about weak quality control of this kind of project. An investigation published by The Guardian and Die Zeit earlier this year alleged more than 90% of Verra’s Redd+ projects were not driving emission reductions, largely because developers exaggerated the threat forests were facing. Verra disputed the findings.

Climate Home and Unearthed found that, in addition to inflated baselines, underreporting of forest loss throughout a project’s lifetime and light-touch regulation can lead to far too many credits being generated.

“The findings point out deep flaws in the forest carbon offset mechanism”, said Souparna Lahiri, a climate adviser for the Global Forest Coalition. The fact deforestation is increasing, instead of going down, “is deeply concerning” and “strengthens our conviction that the mechanism of offsetting cannot be fixed”, he added.

Self-reported deforestation

Each carbon credit represents a ton of CO2 kept from being released into the atmosphere by protecting trees. If a larger portion of forest is cleared than project developers claim, the volume of emissions they avoid will be overstated. When used by companies or governments to compensate for their emissions elsewhere, these credits would have a negative climate impact.

Verra says its role is to make sure that, when a company does invest in a carbon project, it has integrity and meaning, verified by the best standards and science. Monitoring reports are a crucial part of how progress is measured, since they disclose setbacks such as rising deforestation.

Monitoring reports are audited by third parties, then submitted publicly on a project’s page, alongside a host of other documents. In practice, they can be difficult for the public to understand and evaluate. There’s no standardised way to monitor projects.

The way the Cambodian government and its partners monitor deforestation in the Tumring area is opaque. They use national land cover data produced by Cambodia’s environment ministry that is not available publicly. It has a low tree cover threshold, meaning an area needs as little as 10% of trees to be counted as forested. To put it another way, you could chop down 90% of tree cover in a previously untouched section and still claim the forest was intact.

Cambodia has one of the highest deforestation rates in the world, according to Global Forest Watch. Photo: Un Yarat / US Embassy Phnom Penh

The Cambodian government has previously tried to discredit independent analysis showing that deforestation is higher in the country than state records.

Wildlife Works, which worked as a technical consultant for project validation and verification, said it “had no connection to the project” since completing the job and directed questions to the Cambodian government.

The Cambodian government did not respond to a request for comment. The Korean government told Climate Home and Unearthed that only credits from 2021 onwards would be used to offset national emissions.

Industry transparency

The Integrity Council for the Voluntary Carbon Market, an independent governance body for the industry, has called for greater transparency, urging offsetting projects to make all their information accessible to a “non-specialised audience” so a project’s climate impact can be better assessed.

Gilles Dufrasne, from the NGO Carbon Market Watch, said: “Current practice on the market simply isn’t up to standard and this lack of transparency needs to be plugged. More credible, and transparent, use of forest monitoring data is part of this.”

Sylvera, a carbon offsets analytics provider, noted in its 2022 State of Carbon report that the majority of the company’s D-rated projects, of which Tumring is one, “grossly under-reported the deforestation in the project area and have exceeded the baseline emissions”.

Samuel Gill, Sylvera co-founder and president, told Unearthed and Climate Home: “The technology to largely resolve issues like underreporting or overcrediting already exist and are being deployed.” He added: “These improvements take time to filter through the system and in the next few years we should see considerable uplift in project quality as a result.”

In theory, Verra already has various mechanisms to prevent worthless credits linked to deforestation from flooding the market and to punish project developers responsible for any irregularities.

Project owners are required to set aside in a “buffer pool”: a portion of credits that cannot be traded on the market. These act like an insurance policy: if trees meant to be protected end up being felled or burned in a fire, credits in the pool should be cancelled to ensure the integrity of the credits previously sold for offsetting purposes.

Additionally, complaints may trigger a project review and, if a developer is found to have issued too many credits, it can be sanctioned or made to pay a compensation.

But carbon market experts have doubts over the effectiveness of the system, saying the size and use case of buffer pools may be too limited. Only one project has ever had credits from the buffer pool cancelled, according to the Verra register.

Recurring problem

Over 17,000 kilometres away from Tumring, the Rio Preto-Jacundá Redd+ project is meant to achieve the same goal and protect an area of the Brazilian Amazon state of Rondonia.

The project has sold more than one million credits, with big name buyers including German utility Entega, Bank of Santander’s Brazilian arm, and Brazilian financial services giant Banco Bradesco.

From when it began in 2012 to 2020, the latest year available in monitoring reports, the project recorded 5,884 ha of loss, with a sharp increase from 2016. Global Forest Watch data shows it lost 8,200 ha of forest – 33% higher than the numbers declared by the project owner, Biofílica Ambipar.

The scheme’s “without project” scenario, to show what would happen under business as usual, predicted 9,922 ha of loss in the same period.

‘On watch’

Sylvera, an offsetting rating agency that independently checks and verifies projects using a combination of satellite imagery and machine learning, has placed the Rio Preto project “on watch”, after noting significant and increasing deforestation within the project area.

Biofílica Ambipar, which runs the Rio Preto scheme, said it “works continuously to monitor, identify and report any illegal activity to the Brazilian public environmental authorities”.

The company says it relies on the Prodes system to monitor forest loss in the area. Created by the National Institute for Space Research in 1988, Prodes is also used by the Brazilian government for its official annual deforestation reports.

“According to the Prodes system, the deforestation rates in the region are lower than those informed by Global Forest Watch, which is not as accurate in classifying deforestation,” Biofílica Ambipar said.

Prodes is used to detect large-scale changes in primary forest, but it can miss smaller changes. The system uses satellite images that only detect clearcut logging of more than 6.25 hectares – an area equivalent to nearly nine football pitches – missing smaller-scale forest loss. The University of Maryland data, made available through Global Forest Watch, captures losses as small as 0.1 hectares, while also picking up forest degradation.

Still selling credits

Another Biofílica project was abruptly cancelled last year after part of it was legally deforested by the landowner. But carbon credits generated by the scheme are still on the market.

The Maísa project covered over 25,000 hectares of forest in the state of Pará controlled by a family-owned agroindustrial company, which runs eucalyptus, Brazil nuts and açaí plantations.

When the project began in 2012, the firm agreed with Biofílica to protect the trees and invest in better forest management practices in exchange for a share of the profits from the sale of carbon credits.

Since then, polluters including steel giant ArcelorMittal have bought hundreds of thousands of its credits.

But starting from last year the landowner began clearing increasingly larger areas of the forest in what Biofílica says was a breach of their agreement.

The project developer decided to stop the project, but it is still listed on the Verra register and its credits continue to be used for offsetting purposes. Over 38,000 credits have been retired since the project was stopped by Biofilica – more than 4,000 of them purchased by Uber to compensate for the emissions spewed by its fleet of cars in Central and South America.

Uber said that it “only invests in projects certified, traceable, and auditable by Verra, the United Nations, Gold Standard, and Climate Action Reserve [other verifying bodies for offsetting schemes] after a thorough investigation”.

Lure of agribusiness

Biofílica told Unearthed and Climate Home that the company had made it a policy to stop selling credits from the Maísa project as soon as it became aware of the legal logging. It added that “the project is currently in the process of being terminated and audited in line with Verra procedures.”

Asked what would happen to old credits in the project that are still available on the market through third-party sellers, Biofílica’s spokesperson said: “It is important to highlight that the credits that are still being sold by traders and brokers refer to credits verified in previous years, when there was still no legal deforestation scenario in the area; that is, they were audited and verified credits.”

However, when trees are cut down, the carbon stored in them is released back into the atmosphere, no matter if they were originally protected, negating any potential climate benefit. Experts say good projects need to ensure the carbon they sequester or avoid will remain out of the atmosphere for at least 100 years.

When asked what happens to credits in projects that are cancelled, a Verra spokesperson said projects are required to deposit a percentage of their credits into buffer pools which can be drawn on if a portion of the forest is lost.

Maísa’s buffer pool contains 131,600 credits which have currently been placed on hold, meaning Verra still needs to decide their fate. That is only 20% of the total credits put on the market for offsetting purposes, most of which have already been used.

Biofílica spokesperson suggested that what happened with the Maísa project was a sign that Redd+ projects can struggle to compete with the economic opportunities offered by agricultural production in the Amazon.

They said: “Maísa shows the reality of the Amazon region and illustrates the difficulties that all actors interested in conservation face in making carbon projects financially viable.”

The post Exposed: carbon offsets linked to high forest loss still on sale appeared first on Climate Home News.

The moves were agreed by a group of government ministers at the Interministerial Committee on Climate Change last week.

The government will change Brazil’s climate plan, resuming the level of ambition presented in 2015 “in terms of absolute values ​​of greenhouse gas emissions”, it said.

President Lula Da Silva is expected to officially announce this at the United Nations (UN) General Assembly in New York on Tuesday.

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Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former environment minister and Lula advisor, welcomed the decision saying “Brazil finally recognises the mistakes made by the previous government”.

“We have again a baseline pointing in the right direction from whom to discuss the future,” she told Climate Home News. “Brazil has the ambition to do more in the future. It can move from green-wishing to green-doing”.

Claudio Angelo from the Observatorio Do Clima says it is an important first step, but bolder commitments are needed.

“We are finally burying Bolsonaro’s toxic climate governance legacy,” he said. “But this is nowhere near the ambition we need to show in a country whose president says he wants to lead on climate”.

Bolsonaro’s cuts

In its first UN climate plan in 2015, the Brazilian government led by Lula ally Dilma Rousseff pledged to cut emissions by 37% between 2005 and 2025 and by 43% by 2030.

Under UN rules, governments are supposed to progressively increase their ambition but the Bolsonaro administration twice used accounting tricks to weaken its climate goals.

In 2020 it reiterated the same targets but tweaked the baseline emission data, allowing for more emission than the previous version in absolute terms.

The Brazilian climate target in 2015 was more ambitious than its 2020 or 2022 ones. Source: Observatório do Clima

Following pressure from civil society and the international community, the government made a new update in 2022, raising the 2050 target to 50%.

But the proposal still permitted the emission of 70 MtCO2e more than what was first proposed in 2015.

Ana Toni, national secretary for climate change at environment ministry, said the return to stricter targets is “very important symbolically because it helps to end the evil things that the Bolsonaro government did”.

More ambition needed

Toni added that the government will now get to work on a new climate plan, which “will logically be more ambitious than that”. But she did not announce a timeline for its development.

The government has set up two working groups on the new plan – one for emissions-cutting and one for adapting to climate change.

Subgroups will be cretaed to draw up eight emissions-cutting plans for different sectors and 14 adaptation plans.

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Observatorio Do Clima’s Angelo does not expect the new plan to be released before Cop30, which Brazil will host in the Amazonian city of Belém.

Halting deforestation

Brazil is the world’s seventh-largest carbon dioxide emitter, according to Climate Watch, much of it driven by the clearing of trees in the Amazon rainforest.

Deforestation reached record levels under the government of Bolsonaro, who slashed environmental protection programmes.

Before coming back into office, Lula promised to reverse that trend and combat deforestation.

His efforts are achieving some initial results: tree loss has fallen  by nearly a half between January and August, compared to the same period of 2022.

The article was amended on 18/9 after publication to add a comment from Izabella Teixeira and on 19/9 to say that Lula is expected to announce the policy on Tuesday, rather than Wednesday.

The post Lula scraps Bolsonaro’s cuts to Brazilian climate target ambition appeared first on Climate Home News.

Brazil felt targeted by a “side letter” added this year to the trade deal struck in 2019, adding environmental guarantees to the original accord, they said. The new Brazilian government of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, who has made bold pledges of environmental stewardship in contrast to his predecessor, has taken its time to come up with a response.

But the South American trade bloc Mercosur will prepare its counterproposal this weekbefore meeting with EU negotiators in August in the hopes of closing the accord by the end of the year, two Brazilian diplomats told Reuters.

The sources said Brazil would also seek new exceptions to opening government purchases for foreign firms in the health industry, public-sector construction and green technology.

Brazil’s Foreign Ministry and the EU declined to comment.

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The Europeans drafted the side letter in response to Brazil’s far-right former President Jair Bolsonaro, who undercut environmental protections, allowing deforestation to soar. Since coming to power at the start of the year, Lula has improved Brazil’s environmental policy, but European diplomats say the EU still needs guarantees against a relapse.

Brazil fears the addendum could lead to trade sanctions. Its diplomats complain that the new rules go beyond the Paris climate agreement.

“There are new obligations that are unacceptable. If sanctions are applied, we want other concessions to compensate,” the diplomat said, requesting anonymity ahead of sensitive negotiations.

The EU recently passed a law banning six imported products if linked to deforestation, which Brazilian exporters and government officials saw as a protectionist move.

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One of the Brazilian diplomats said that new law had muddied the waters by failing to distinguish between legal and illegal deforestation in Brazil, making it more difficult to conclude the trade talks by year-end.

The EU has warned against trying to renegotiate parts of the trade agreement, given that it took two decades to reach an initial deal. Brazilian diplomats say they are seeking to tweak concessions and quotas, so as not to reopen chapters that could stall the whole deal.

A European diplomat in Brasilia said the EU hoped to resume talks in August with the Mercosur counterproposal on the table.

He said a “re-balancing” of concessions, however, would be difficult without reopening chapters of the trade deal.

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“The government procurement chapter is not very comprehensive and already includes a lot of exceptions, but okay, let’s look at this,” he added, noting that the defense industry was already excluded, along with Brazil’s state and municipal governments.

On the environmental guarantees irking Brazil’s new government, the European diplomat said the EU recognized what Brazil is now doing to protect the Amazon forest.

“But we still need guarantees going forward because we conclude agreements with the country and not with the government that is in office,” he said.

For Welber Barral, a former Brazilian foreign trade secretary, there is a window to finalize the accord, which has never had so much support from Brazil’s private sector. But ironing out remaining differences could take time.

“To be realistic, concluding it by the end of the year is a very optimistic goal,” he said.

The post Brazil seeks European trade advantages in return for Amazon protection appeared first on Climate Home News.

Leaders will be meeting next month at the Amazon Summit in Belém, a city also due to host the Cop30 climate talks in 2025, to discuss the 45-year-old Amazon Cooperation Treaty for the first time in several years.

The final guest list is not yet clear, but nations across Latin America are expected to be represented as well as some from Europe.

Brazilian president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva has rebooted the summit in the hope of using it to build support for his commitment to end illegal deforestation in the Amazon by 2030, but curbing fossil fuel extraction does not appear to be on the agenda.

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However, a grassroots campaign led by Indigenous groups and civil society argues such a move is essential to combat climate change, and to protect biodiversity and the Indigenous people that live there.

The campaign builds on an existing effort to get a global pact for the permanent protection of four-fifths of Amazonia by 2025. Focusing specifically on oil and gas, it calls for an Amazon exclusion zone where no fossil fuels can be exploited, in line with the International Energy Agency’s (IEA) warning that there can be no new fossil fuel projects if the world is to stay under a 1.5°C warming threshold.

Domestic exploitation

A number of South American countries in which the Amazon rainforest lies have been trying to boost domestic oil and gas exploration and extraction in recent years. 

Peru is proposing to place 31 oil blocks over 435 indigenous communities, while Bolivia recently finalised an ‘Upstream Reactivation Plan’.

Meanwhile, the result of a forthcoming Ecuadorian referendum about oil exploitation in the Yasuní rainforest will be hugely significant for that part of the Amazon but will also send a wider message about the region’s priorities.

In Brazil, a far-right Congress is proposing to gut the powers of both the ministries of the environment and Indigenous peoples, throwing Lula’s deforestation pledge into doubt. 

The Brazilian president’s own ambitions of positioning himself as climate leader have also been called into question over his stance on an oil drilling project at the mouth of the Amazon river. He recently said he found it “difficult” to believe that oil exploration in the Amazon basin would damage the region’s rainforest.

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Ahead of the Amazon Summit, Indigenous groups will be meeting in Brazil to share fossil fuel resistance strategies, with the support of campaign group 350.org. 

“From this we hope will come a very powerful document that will inform the discussions of the presidents in Belém,” said Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America managing director. “Hopefully it will have some very strong messages saying no new fossil fuel projects in the Amazon.”

Petro’s lead

Zugman said Colombian president Gustavo Petro had been a “very loud voice” in support of this idea. In January, Petro announced a halt in all new oil and gas exploration contracts, keeping 380 currently active contracts. 

In a recent opinion piece for the Miami Herald, Petro called on Amazon countries and their partners in the Global North to follow him on ending all new oil and gas exploration in the Amazon.

He said that, while ending deforestation was “fundamental”, it had to be accompanied by “an ambitious transnational policy to phase out fossil fuels”. Oil, gas and coal accounts for about half of all Colombian exports.

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Petro said some countries, like Colombia, could allocate a “substantial amount of resources” to protect the Amazon. 

But he stressed that curbing oil and gas exploitation would have a big economic impact on poorer South American nations and called on countries like the US to help with financial mechanisms such as debt-for-climate swaps, a multilateral fund that funds environmental protection services by inhabitants of these territories, or the kind of financial reforms being progressed by the Bridgetown initiative. 

At a recent meeting, the Colombian and Brazilian presidents pledged to cooperate to protect the Amazon but the latter did not appear to make any concessions on oil and gas.

“We need to convince other presidents like Lula.. to step up as well and really play this leadership role,” said Zugman, “to not allow fossil fuel exploration in one of the most important places of the world.” 

Banking spotlight

Campaigners are also stepping up pressure on financial institutions to stop financing oil and gas projects in the region.

A report, published today by NGO Stand.earth and the Coordinator of Indigenous Organizations of the Amazon Basin (COICA), shows that US$20 billion has been provided to explore and exploit reserves in Peru, Colombia, Brazil and Ecuador over the past 15 years.

More than half of this (US$11 billion) came from just eight banks: JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Itaú Unibanco, HSBC, Santander, Bank of America, Banco Bradesco and Goldman Sachs.

Six of these banks are either headquartered in the US or act through their US subsidiary and operate in deals across the region, while the two Brazilian companies – Itaú Unibanco and Banco Bradesco – are highly connected to specific oil and gas projects in that country. 

The report is accompanied by a database of all the banks involved in Amazon oil and gas through directly traceable and indirect financing, for example by providing loans or underwriting bond deals for upstream and midstream development and transport of oil and gas in Amazonia. 

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JPMorgan Chase tops the list, having directly provided US$1.9 billion in direct financing to oil and gas in the region over the past decade and a half.

Together with HSBC, it was a major backer of Petroperú’s Talara refinery expansion project, which is driving the exploitation of oil on Indigenous land in the Peruvian Amazon.

JPMorgan Chase has ruled out support for the highly controversial East African Crude Oil Pipeline project, but made no such commitment on oil and gas activity in the Amazon or wider fossil fuel expansion. 

The Stand.earth report says an Amazon exclusion for financial institutions is an “essential strategy” to protect the region from oil, gas, and other extractive industries.

Although no banks have completely ruled out funding fossil fuels in Amazonia – the geographic region around the Amazon basin – the report does praise some companies for starting to recognise the risks involved. 

Exclusion policies

 In May 2022, BNP Paribas pledged to no longer finance or invest in companies producing from oil and gas reserves in the Amazon or developing related infrastructure, becoming the first major bank to adopt a geographical exclusion of oil and gas in this area.

And in December 2022, HSBC amended its policies to exclude all new finance and advisory services for any client for oil and gas project exploration, appraisal, development, and production in the Amazon Biome.

The EU-Mercosur trade deal will harm Brazil’s indigenous communities

Stand.earth says these two companies, along with some others, are “sending important signals” that banks should be willing to review their relationship to Amazon destruction and take steps to manage that risk.

These also go some way towards the Exit Amazon Oil and Gas principles devised by international advocacy groups including Stand.earth and Amazon Indigenous leaders.

Clear boundaries

Angeline Robertson, lead researcher of Stand Research Group, said efforts to restrict fossil fuels should cover the wider Amazonia area “to avoid confusion or allow banks to define the exclusion zone themselves.

This was an issue with Arctic exclusions, where banks used different boundaries in their policies.”  Standard Chartered’s and BNP Paribas’ exclusions, for example, cover the ‘Amazon’ or ‘Amazon Basin’, while Société Générale and Intesa Sanpaolo’s policies include only the Amazon regions of Ecuador and Peru.

Zugman said both governments and financial institutions had a big role to play in protecting the region. “Governments need to step up first. And banks… should be there by their side to support these bold decisions and to help accelerate the just energy transition.”

He added that banks could play an important role in the Amazon by supporting a just energy transition. “Energy access is still a big deal in the Amazon and banks could, in consultation with communities, be helping them have clean access to energy instead of investing in businesses that are going to destroy their lands.”

Zugman said the Belém summit was vital because it would inform about protection of the Amazon at Cop28 in December as well as the next G20 meeting which Brazil is due to host. “We’re really pushing together for this moment.” 

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Its crimes attracted global attention: from dismantling policies to protect the natural world, to the spiralling number of attacks on Indigenous People and incursions on their land, to deforestation reaching its highest levels for years.

For the European Union (EU), Brazil’s second largest trading partner and a large importer of the soy and beef driving deforestation in the country, alarm over these issues led to the suspension of a mammoth trade agreement, which had been 20 years in the making.

The free trade deal between the EU and Brazil and other Mercosur nations was approved in 2019 but was never ratified because of fears that it might intensify environmental and human rights abuses in Brazil.

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Now, with Bolsonaro ejected from office by the electorate, and his successor, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, making efforts to end deforestation and protect land rights, finalising the EU Mercosur agreement is a priority once again. It will be high on the agenda in the summit taking place this week in Brussels between EU and Latin American heads of state.

Ongoing threats

Yet despite the change of government in Brazil, the assault on Indigenous People’s land rights continues.

The reason is simple: Bolsonaro was defeated at the polls, but Bolsonarism survives as a political force.

Brazil remains deeply polarised, with the mighty agribusiness sector (responsible for a quarter of Brazil’s GDP in 2022) on one side of the divide, helping orchestrate the relentless attacks against Indigenous Peoples’ rights.

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While Lula has shown a serious intent to protect land rights and forests, he is being thwarted by his political opponents in Brazil’s National Congress, where he lacks a majority.

Agribusiness is helping drive proposals for laws which would enable mining to take place on protected Indigenous lands, and for Brazil to withdraw from the International Labour Organisation’s convention recognising Indigenous People’s right to free, prior and informed consent. Meanwhile the powers of the Minister for Indigenous Affairs powers have been eroded by Congress.

Last month, Brazil’s lower house voted overwhelmingly in favour of a bill that among other setbacks proposes the legal establishment of the Marco Temporal thesis, which only recognises Indigenous People’s right to territory they were occupying on October 5, 1988 – when the current Brazilian constitution came into force.

Marco Temporal poses a huge threat to Indigenous territories. The indigenous organisation APIB has estimated that almost 1,400 Indigenous lands are endangered by this proposal, which will open the door to farming and mining interests, and the inevitable environmental and social chaos that will follow in their wake – all in the name of commerce.

Fuel to the flames

A knock-on effect of these multiple legislative efforts to weaken Indigenous land rights is that it creates legal uncertainty in international trade, specifically putting companies at risk of importing goods produced on land whose ownership is disputed.

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In this context, proceeding with the EU-Mercosur free trade agreement would add fuel to the flames: increasing the trade of agricultural commodities will only magnify the pressure on Indigenous lands.

As it stands, the EU-Mercosur agreement contains no measures to protect Indigenous Peoples. Before moving ahead with the deal, this must be rectified.

The agreement must explicitly provide Indigenous Peoples with the right to free, prior and informed consent about any trade or investment that may affect them. It should also champion traceability, so that all companies would have to know the origin of the goods they import. Finally, it should include sanctions for companies sourcing from Indigenous lands and committing environmental crimes.

In the aftermath of Lula’s election, news of the enduring threat to the Amazon and Brazil’s other biomes has largely slipped beneath the radar in the EU.

But it could be disastrous if EU lawmakers ignore it, as they push to revive the EU-Mercosur trade agreement without the right measures in place.

Dinamam Tuxá is executive coordinator of Articulação dos Povos Indígenas do Brasil (APIB), Brazil’s largest Indigenous Peoples’ representative body, representing more than 300 Brazilian Indigenous ethnic groups.

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The International Finance Corporation’s (IFC) board was initially due to vote at its 30 April meeting on a BRL160 million ($32 million) loan to Alvoar Lacteos intended to help the company expand its operations in Brazil and support wider food security.

Alvoar Lacteos owns and manages industrial facilities in the Midwest and Northeast regions of Brazil, making products such as UHT milk, powdered milk, yogurt, cheese and sweets. The money would be used to install new equipment, renovate existing industrial units and build a new unit for cheese production, as well as for improving the company’s environmental and social standards.

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A group of 16 Brazilian and international organisations, including Friends of the Earth, the Global Forest Coalition, the International Accountability Project and the Brazilian Network for Social Justice and Human Rights, wrote to the IFC in April urging it to reject the loan, arguing it had not properly accounted for the project’s environmental and social impacts.

The decision has since been rescheduled to the end of May. Emails sent by IFC and seen by Climate Home News imply is so the IFC board can consider evidence presented by the group, although an IFC spokesperson told Climate Home “the timing of when projects are taken to the board is dependent on numerous factors”.

Neither the IFC nor Alvoar Lacteos responded to questions about the concerns raised or the delay.

Suppliers emissions ignored

Civil society groups raised numerous concerns about the loan, including a claim that it is incompatible with the IFC’s commitment to align investments with a 1.5C global warming threshold.

The only current climate-related requirement in the project’s environmental and social action plan is for Alvoar Lacteos to prepare its first greenhouse gas inventory and estimate the emissions under its direct control (scope 1 and 2) “following an internationally recognized methodology, and local regulations”.  It has until April 2024 to do this.

There is no requirement for the company to monitor scope 3 emissions from its suppliers, like the chopping down of forests to graze cattle, which comprise the vast majority of a dairy company’s climate impact. The civil society organisations argue these emissions should be “the focus of reduction and mitigation measures”.

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Kelly Anne McNamara is a senior research and policy analyst in the international climate and agriculture finance programme of Friends of the Earth, one of the organisations that has challenged the loan. 

She told Climate Home the IFC had clarified that it was working with Alvoar on addressing its scope 3 emissions by avoiding deforestation on dairy farms and farms associated with sourcing feed. But she pointed out that no actual mitigation or reduction is required under the terms of the loan.

Paris alignment

Two years ago, the World Bank pledged to align all its financing with the goals of the Paris Agreement and it says it is on track to do this for all its new operations from July 2023. The IFC has a weaker target of aligning 85% of new operations by that date and 100% from July 2025.

However, a new climate framework for multilateral development banks is under development which the IFC will be using to assess its investments. It says that”non-ruminant livestock” are consistent with the Paris agreement’s goal but it does not mention ruminant livestock like cows and sheep.

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Campaigners said the framework suggests that such projects will require evaluations against specific greenhouse gas reduction criteria but have seen no evidence that the IFC has assessed the Alvoar project in this way.

“Had IFC done so, it might understand that there is a need for a major reduction in production in the cattle sector in the [Latin America and the Caribbean] region, along with a heightened focus on measures to significantly cut the [greenhouse gas] footprint of existing operations through better management practices,” they wrote in their letter.

This, they said, could include a shift away from intensive feed and milk production, toward silvopasture and agroforestry practices that increase sequestration and do not rely on fossil fuel-based fertilisers and pesticides.

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International development banks, including the IFC, have spent billions supporting the meat and dairy industries over the past decade. Although the IFC stopped supporting new coal projects in April, it has made no explicit restrictions on other activities that generate greenhouse gas emissions.

The civil society groups also pointed out that Alvoar has not set itself a net zero target, and said this should be a requirement for the project.

And they criticised the IFC for not doing enough to understand other potential environmental and social issues linked to dairy supply chains, such as child and forced labour, land rights and deforestation.

Alvoar does not own any cattle farms so its milk is sourced from 5,500 farmers, including dairy cooperatives and individual farmers, as well as middlemen. Campaigners say it has no supply chain management system in place to address these.

No hard requirement

Although the IFC expects Alvoar to develop such a system if the loan is approved, campaigners note that there is no hard requirement to achieve full supply chain traceability or zero deforestation by a specific date.

Campaigners argue the IFC was wrong to conclude that any risks from the project would be short-term and localised and said it should have required a more comprehensive environmental and social assessment and mitigation plan.

Although the loan is in part intended to help Alvoar boost its environmental and social standards, critics said the onus was on the IFC to understand those risks in advance.

Lula set to improve Brazil’s climate target

Campaigners also question whether the loan will actually help increase food access for the neediest Brazilians.

IFC loans are normally approved without controversy. But last year a decision on whether to approve another agricultural project – soy and corn feed sourcing by the Brazilian arm of a major European meat producer – was also delayed after campaigners expressed doubts about its impact on deforestation.

McNamara said that, although the earlier loan was eventually approved, some IFC board directors abstained and several encouraged campaigners to keep raising concerns. In the case of the Alvoar project, however, she thinks food security arguments are likely to over-ride other considerations.

The IFC board is made up of 25 representatives of different governments.

This article was updated on 26 May 2023 to include IFC’s statement

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In 2021, amid growing global outrage over Bolsonaro turning a blind eye to the destruction of the Amazon rainforest, his government pledged to cut greenhouse emissions by 50% by 2030, up from a previous commitment of 43%.

But Bolsonaro’s government used a higher, 2005 baseline – a move that made it easier for Brazil to reach its target compared with the previous pledge and that was widely criticized by environmentalists.

Brazilian lobby group Climate Observatory calculated that the Bolsonaro target would allow an additional 400 million tonnes of greenhouse gas to be emitted, compared to the prior target.

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To address those issues, Lula’s leftist government intends to maintain the 50% reduction but fix the issue with the baseline, two sources with direct knowledge of the matter told Reuters. Both spoke anonymously as the move is not yet public.

The goal is to issue the revised target, known as a nationally determined contribution under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, later this year. After the change, the target will be “more ambitious,” one of the sources said.

The government is exploring ways to simplify the target, including issuing the exact number of gigatonnes of greenhouse gas that the country will seek to reduce, the source added.

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Neither Brazil’s Environment Ministry nor a representative for Bolsonaro responded to requests for comment.

Lula took office on Jan. 1 with a pledge to restore Brazil as a global leader on climate change. Bolsonaro had appointed climate skeptics to key positions and presided over soaring levels of Amazon deforestation, the largest source of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions.

Before he was elected, his environmental adviser Izabella Teixera told Climate Home that he would update Brazil’s climate target if elected. Campaigners called for him to do so in his first 100 days, a deadline Teixera did not commit to and which Lula has now missed.

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Brazil’s environmental regulator Ibama, late on Wednesday, said it would block a request by state-run oil giant Petrobras to drill at the mouth of the Amazon river near Amapá, in a much-awaited decision that followed a technical recommendation by Ibama experts to reject the project.

In a filing, Petrobras said it planned to file an appeal for Ibama to reconsider its ruling, saying it “strictly complied with all the requirements of the licensing process.”

The decision by Ibama, which is overseen by Lula’s environment minister, the globally recognized environmentalist Marina Silva, has riled some within the governing coalition.

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Lula, who hails from the poor northeast, has staked his international reputation on reversing environmental back-sliding under his far-right predecessor former President Jair Bolsonaro. But he is also under pressure to deliver much-needed growth to poor, under-developed regions in the north and northeast, and wants state-owned Petrobras to be an engine of that growth.

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Senator Randolfe Rodrigues, who represents the state of Amapa, said Ibama had taken a decision with major economic impact for the state without taking into account the views of the people of Amapa or its state government. Rodrigues is a senior Lula ally who ran his presidential campaign last year.

“We’ll fight against this decision,” Rodrigues wrote on Twitter, adding that “the people of Amapa want to have the right to be heard”. He later announced he was departing his party, the center-left Sustainability Network, in light of the decision.

A decisão do Ibama contrária à pesquisas na costa do Amapá não ouviu o governo local e nenhum cidadão do meu estado. O povo amapaense quer ter o direito de ser escutado sobre a possível existência e eventual destino de nossas riquezas (…)

— Randolfe Rodrigues (@randolfeap) May 18, 2023

The Sustainability Network was founded in the early 2010s by Silva, the environment minister, who appointed Ibama head Rodrigo Agostinho.

Agostinho told GloboNews TV on Thursday that Petrobras would be allowed to file a new request to drill in the region, but noted that studies presented by the firm to date were not enough for the move to be cleared.

Petrobras said in its filing that it was not giving up hope on its plans to develop an oil-rich region with potential reserves of up to 14 billion barrels of oil.

“The company remains committed to the development of the Brazilian Equatorial Margin,” it said, adding it would “ensure the country’s energy security.”

Final decision

Despite Petrobras’ stated intentions, the ruling effectively ends all future development of the unexplored oil prospects at the mouth of the Amazon river, former Ibama boss Suely Araujo told Reuters.

Araujo said that even if Petrobras undertakes the deeper studies requested by Ibama, the final say would still rest with the regulator. “The decision is final,” she said, adding she expected Lula to support Ibama’s ruling.

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Exploration rights in the area were auctioned in 2013, but oil majors BP and TotalEnergies pulled out due to the cost of the off-shore studies and difficulties in obtaining licenses for drilling, while Petrobras kept going.

Neither Lula’s office, nor the environment ministry responded to requests for comment.

Environmental groups celebrated Ibama’s decision.

In a statement, Greenpeace said Ibama had emphasized the need for “a fair energy transition, instead of insisting on yet another oil exploration frontier in the context of the climate crisis.”

Ibama has “postponed the end of the world,” environmental group Observatorio do Clima proclaimed.

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In a joint statement, the countries said they “intend to engage collaboratively in support of eliminating global illegal logging and deforestation through effectively enforcing their respective laws on banning illegal imports and exports”.

Brazilian President Lula da Silva met with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping during a visit to China, in a bid to strengthen ties. China is Brazil’s largest trading partner and a major importer of commodities such as soy and crude petroleum.

Both countries added they will cooperate with satellite information, “which will enable enhanced monitoring”. China and Brazil share the CBERS satellite program, which made its first launch back in 2001.

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Cyntia Feitosa, international relations advisor at the Brazilian think tank Instituto Clima e Sociedade, said the joint statement was “a very good signal”, but warned there’s still questions about how it would be put into practice.

“It would be very good to see some joint traceability strategy, for example, to avoid the export of any product that has deforestation in its supply chain,” Feitosa said.

A 2019 report by the Brazilian NGO Amazon Watch showed that companies charged with environmental crimes in the Amazon were still able to export their products to the international market, in particular to Brazil’s three main trading partners — China, the EU and the US.

Climate leadership

With the arrival of Lula da Silva to Brazil’s presidency, the country resumed its efforts to influence global climate action. Da Silva also retook a closer relation with China, which at times was tense under the last government of Jair Bolsonaro.

Both countries now agreed to establish a Subcommittee on Environment and Climate Change and support Brazil’s bid for Cop30. Back in January, Da Silva expressed his desire to host the UN climate talks in Belem, the second-biggest city in the Amazon region.

Lula revives $1 billion Amazon Fund and environmental protections

“China welcomes the Brazilian candidacy to host COP30, as the 2025 summit will be key to the very future of the global response to climate change,” the statement said.

Feitosa welcomed the countries’ collaboration with climate action at the center. “I hope this is reflected in a collaborative posture in the negotiations and the search for effective solutions at a crucial moment for the next steps in the implementation of the Paris Agreement,” she said.

Li Shuo, policy advisor for Greenpeace East Asia, said Brazil and China hold a big sway among develpoping countries, putting them in a unique position to lead initiatives coming from the Global South.

“A Brazil that is back to international scene and a China that seeks to enhance developing country solidarity should not just imply a fortress position, but rather a stance that champions global south concerns while at the same time advances their own action,” Shuo said.

“What we need is a more forward looking position from them that says developed countries need to act and so do we. Let’s hope the joint statement is a starting point to get us there,” he added.

This story was updated to include comments from Li Shuo.

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Police are setting up new Amazon rainforest bases and are seeking international cooperation on law enforcement in the region, including the development of radio-isotope technology to prove the illegal origin of seized gold, Humberto Freire told Reuters.

Freire is the director of the newly-created environment and Amazon department of the federal police, marking what he called a new era in the battle against environmental crime and in defense of indigenous people in the rainforest.

Adding to the urgency in the early months of President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva’s term, the government in January declared a humanitarian crisis in Yanomami territory.

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The territory had been invaded by thousands of gold miners threatening communities with firearms, driving deforestation, spreading malaria, polluting rivers and scaring off wild game, which led to malnutrition and hundreds of deaths.

“We still have some pockets of miners who are holding out by hiding in some areas, so we going through the Yanomami territory with a fine comb,” Freire said in an interview.

Enforcement operations supported by satellite imagery and aerial photography have destroyed 250 miner camps – many of which were already deserted – and 70 dredging rafts, along with speed boats and planes, he said. Police have seized some 4,500 liters of fuel and 1.2 kilos of gold, he added.

Police encountered and then released at least 805 miners and 94 boats on rivers, but most fled before the eviction operation.

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The police did not focus on arresting miners, Freire said, instead seizing or blocking 68 million reais ($13 million) of resources belonging to those accused of financing the illegal miners, while dismantling a prostitution network that took underage girls to the mining camps.

Junior Hekurari, head of the local indigenous health council, estimated that 85% of the gold miners had left or been forced out of the reservation the size of Portugal, which extends along Brazil’s northern border with Venezuela.

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Two months after the state of emergency was declared by the government, Hekurari told Reuters that the government response is still short of staffing and helicopters to confront the scale of the health emergency among the Yanomami.

The Brazilian government is also studying new laws to stamp out illegal gold mining, which accounts for roughly half of Brazilian gold the country exports to nations, including Switzerland and Britain.

One proposal aimed at cracking down on laundered gold would require electronic tax receipts for the buying and selling of the precious metal.

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Police have also embraced a technology using radio isotopes to identify where gold is mined, even after it has been melted into bars, Freire said. His staff hope to have the main gold producing areas of Brazil mapped out by the end of this year.

Freire said Brazil is also preparing an international police base for the Amazon with neighboring countries.

They also plan to inaugurate on Thursday a floating police station in Atalaia do Norte, on the river where British journalist Dom Phillips and Brazilian indigenous expert Bruno Pereira where murdered last year by fishermen.

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On Friday, Lula visited Washington DC to meet with Biden at the White House. The US government’s summary of the meeting says “the United States announced its intent to work with [the US] Congress to provide funds for programs to protect and conserve the Brazilian Amazon, including initial support for the Amazon Fund, and to leverage investments in this critical region”.

The Amazon Fund is a pot of money administered by the Brazilian Development Bank which is spent on forest protection projects like small-scale farming and management of forests by indigenous people.

The $1.2 billion fund was suspended under Bolsonaro but revived on Lula’s first day in office. It is funded by Norway and Germany and the UK is considering a donation too. The US has never financially backed it before.

“Significant change”

When running to become president in 2020, Biden promised that if elected he would mobilise “the hemisphere and the world” to provide $20bn in public and private money to protect the world’s biggest rainforest.

When he came to power, his administration tried unsuccesfully to negotiate with far-right Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro, who oversaw a spike in rainforest destruction and was hostile to what he claimed was foreign interference in Brazil’s affairs.

In January 2023, left-wing president Lula took power on a promise to end deforestation by giving more power to the environmental protection agencies gutted by Bolsonaro.

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Natalie Unterstell, president of Brazilian think-tank Talanoa Institute, told Climate Home that a US donation to the Amazon Fund would be “a significant change in the way the US deals with climate finance for Brazil as it shifts the resources to Brazilian governance instead of acting through a cooperation agency.”

“It’s quite positive. This is an important gesture and a first step from the perspective of rebuilding the bilateral relationship between the countries. But we will need a billion-dollar strategy, not a million-dollar one, to achieve zero deforestation in this decade,” she added.

Limited budget

But the US has a poor record of delivering public climate finance, consistently giving less than much smaller European economies. The president has to negotiate with Congress over how to spend their budget, gaining the support of 60 of the 100 US Senators and a majority in the House of Representatives.

For the September 2022 to October 2023 fiscal year, Biden asked Congress for $11.4 billion for international climate finance but received only $1bn.

Biden was criticised for not fighting hard enough against Republicans in Congress for that finance. Diana Movius, forest lead at Climate Advisers, told a press briefing last week: “In those last minute budget negotiations with high level folks from both parties and from the administration that finance was likely not prioritised”.

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Since then, Biden’s Democrats have lost control of one part of Congress – the House of Representatives – while having just a slim majority in the Senate.

Joe Thwaites, an international climate finance advocate at the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), said this will make it harder for Biden to get more climate finance when he makes his next budget request in the coming months.

In the October 2022 to September 2023 fiscal year, the Biden administration could give money to the Amazon Fund by drawing upon money earmarked for international development but, Meyer said, there was a lot of competition for this “fairly limited pool of funds”.

Renewed talks

E3G analyst Alden Meyer said that environmentalists would need to “work to block likely efforts to cut international climate funding”.

But both Meyer and Thwaites said that Republicans have tended to support tree-planting and tropical forest conservation more than other climate measures.

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Biden and Lula agreed to re-instate a joint working group on climate change which was set up in 2015 before being disbanded at the end of the year.

The working group will discuss cooperation on topics which include fighting deforestation, supporting clean energy deployment, adapting to climate change, making farming more climate-friendly and enhancing the bioeconomy.

Izabella Teixera was involved in the working group as Brazil’s environment minister between 2010 and 2016. She told Climate Home it had worked well, as then presidents Barack Obama and Dilma Rousseff were involved and influenced the talks at the highest level.

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As part of the package, Brazil’s new leader reinstated the Amazon Fund, a $1.2 billion fund to protect of the world’s largest rainforest, after a three-year period of inactivity.  

Donors Germany and Norway suspended transfers to the fund in 2019, under the previous government of Jair Bolsonaro, after the former president unilaterally suspended the board of directors and the technical committee of the fund.

On Monday, Lula reinstated the fund’s governing body, which Norwegian environment minister Espen Barth Eide said “allows for an immediate reactivation of the fund”.  The UK’s environment minister Therese Coffey said the UK was “seriously looking at” joining the fund.

Destruction of Brazil’s Cerrado savanna soars for third year in a row

The fund, which was established during Lula’s second term in 2008, supports 102 conservation projects in the Amazon, among them forests managed by indigenous people and small-scale farms. 

Among the first executive mandates, Brazil’s new president also moved the Rural Environmental Registry —which tracks all rural land-ownership— from the agriculture to the environment ministry, extinguished the possibility of conciliating environmental fines and reactivated a plan to prevent and control deforestation in the Amazon. 

“There is still a long way to go, but what we’ve seen at the beginning of this mandate is a right start and demonstrates the importance that the issue has gained on Lula’s agenda,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory. 

Green promises 

Lula was sworn into office for a third term on Sunday, after defeating rightwing incumbent Bolsonaro by a thin margin in October’s general election. Bolsonaro’s policies led to a 60% increase in deforestation in the Amazon.

Brazil’s new president promised to achieve zero deforestation in the Amazon and 100% renewable electricity during his inaugural speech, adding “Brazil does not need to cut down forests to keep and expand its strategic agricultural frontier”.

“The world expects Brazil to once again become a leader in tackling the climate crisis and an example of a socially and environmentally responsible country, capable of promoting economic growth with income distribution,” he said.

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Lula appointed former environment minister and activist Marina Silva to once again lead the country’s green efforts. He also created the Ministry of Indigenous Peoples, to be led by the influential Amazonian leader Sônia Guajajara.

The new government’s environment team is promising, said Astrini, but he also warned that Lula will have to negotiate without a majority in Congress, which is dominated by legislators linked to Bolsonaro’s party and to the “ruralist” movement defending agribusiness in the Amazon.

A package of three Bolsonaro-era bills being discussed in Congress could trump Lula’s efforts to control deforestation in the Amazon. These projects would respectively allow for the relaxed use of pesticides, land-grabbing in public forests and weaker regulations for environmental permits.

“Our current Congress is extremely hostile to indigenous and environmental affairs. We have grown used to that. We need a government that defends the environment and that can face that Congress,” said Astrini.

This article was updated on 4 January to add that the UK is considering joining the fund

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Destruction of native vegetation rose by a quarter to 10,689 square kilometers (4,127 square miles) – an area larger than Lebanon. The data from space research agency Inpe is for the 12 months through to July 2022, compared with the same period the previous year.

The Cerrado, the world’s most species-rich savanna, has given way to Brazil’s expanding agricultural frontier for decades. Roughly half of the savanna’s vegetation has already been destroyed, with much of it converted to farms and ranches.

When far-right president Jair Bolsonaro came to power in 2019, deforestation in the Cerrado was at its lowest point for decades. It increased in every year of his time in office. Deforestation in the Amazon rainforest rose too.

Deforestation in the Cerrado has risen in Bolsonaro’s time in power, although it remains lower than previous decades. (Photo: INPE)

Bolsonaro will be replaced by left-winger Lula Ignacio da Silva in January, who has promised to combat deforestation and reduce it to zero in the Amazon rainforest.

Trade levers

The European Union recently agreed on a law to prohibit companies from selling agricultural products linked to deforestation, which would apply to the Amazon rainforest but excluded much of the Cerrado.

Asked about rising Cerrado destruction, EU Environment Commissioner Virginijus Sinkevicius said protections could be expanded.

“We have a review clause in just one year, we will have a look at it,” he said in an interview at the UN’s Cop15 nature summit in Montreal. “If we see patterns shifting to other ecosystems, we will be able to react relatively quickly.”

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Countries at Cop15 aim to strike a deal to protect areas rich in biodiversity like the Cerrado. But with the summit set to end on 19 December, negotiators still disagree on some 200 points, according to conference documents.

“What we eat and how we produce our food are the main drivers of this large-scale obliteration,” said Jean-Francois Timmers, a policy expert for environmental advocates WWF.

“We need Cop15 negotiators to prioritise ending deforestation and conversion in areas where the yearly rate of ecosystem losses prove alarming, like the Cerrado.”

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Last year, the Brazilian congress proposed building 8GW of gas power plants in Brazil’s north-east and a network of pipelines to supply them.

In a legislative trick known as “jabuti” or “tortoise”, the congress successfully made this a condition of them supporting Bolsonaro’s privatisation of Brazilian utility Electrobras.

The project was criticised for environmental and economic reasons. Campaigners said that building the pipelines would cost taxpayers R$100bn ($20bn) and would only benefit a businessman called Carlos Suarez whose company would carry out the project.

A reversão da contratação de usinas termelétricas e a construção de gasodutos que vão ser benefício direto para um empresário monopolista de distribuição de gás em algumas regiões do país é uma ideia que está sendo pensada na equipe de transição de governo. pic.twitter.com/nYaUFuluvn

— Marina Silva (@MarinaSilva) November 28, 2022

Marina Silva is likely to be made environment minister by newly elected president Lula Da Silva, who takes office on 1 January. Silva was his environment minister between 2003 and 2008 and travelled to Cop27 alongside him. Another former Lula environment minister Izabella Teixera told Climate Home that returning to government was “not in [her] plans”.

On Monday, Silva tweeted that the plants and pipelines would benefit a gas monopoly entrepreneur and that cancelling them “is being considered by the government transition team”.

She said the gas plants would cost around R4.3bn ($800m) a year to run and the thousands of kilometres of pipelines would cost another R100bn ($19bn). So the Lula administration would save R$117bn ($22bn) during its four-year term, she said.

Vanuatu publishes draft resolution seeking climate justice at UN court

Most of Brazil’s electricity is produced by hydropower, giving it one of the cleanest electricity systems in the world. According to Global Energy Monitor, it has 14GW of gas power plants – so these 8GW of plants would almost double that.

Claudio Angelo, a spokesperson for Climate Observatory, told Climate Home: “The fiscal situation is the single biggest challenge of the new government right now, so when the president sees a chance to save R117 billion, he will probably jump on it.”

While Lula has promised to clamp down on deforestation in the Amazon and gradually reduce fossil fuel use, he says he will support oil and gas production in Brazil. The state-owned oil company plans to explore 16 oil wells in Brazil’s north.

The post Brazil’s incoming government set to scrap gas pipelines and power plants appeared first on Climate Home News.

Behind security barriers, hundreds packed the Blue Zone pavilion where he was giving his first speech at the summit. One indigenous woman Facetimed a relative in Brazil: “Can you see him? Can you believe he’s right there?” she shouted over the phone.

At the Cop27 climate summit, expectations are high for Brazil’s newly elected leader. Lula won last month’s election promising a dramatic shift in rainforest protection. The outgoing government of Jair Bolsonaro leaves the country’s deforestation rate on a 12-year high.

“Brazil is leaving the cocoon where it was for the past four years,” he said in his first public appearance in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, on Wednesday. He started the previous evening, meeting with climate envoys from China and the US. 

Lula even announced a bid to bring Cop30 to the Amazon, in the state of Amazonas or Pará. It is the turn of a Latin American country to host in 2026. “People who defend the climate should know closely what is that region,” he said. 

Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor

How much he can live up to the task is yet to be seen. He has no majority in Congress and inflation is driving the country to the brink of recession. He admitted high expectations “scare” him in an interview with The New Yorker.

Still, the fate of the Amazon rainforest depends in great part on Lula. The world’s biggest rainforest basin is at a tipping point.

Recent studies found that, over the last decade, the Amazon started to emit more carbon than it absorbs through photosynthesis. This is mainly as a result of rainforest clearance for cattle ranches and soy plantations.

Politically motivated charges

In a previous term as president 2003-10, Lula cracked down on deforestation. Since then, the leftist politician has spent time in prison before dramatically resurrecting his reputation.

Four years ago, Lula was jailed in federal police headquarters in the state of Curitiba, charged with corruption and money laundering. The Supreme Court revoked his sentence, judging it biased by political opponents. Now, he’s back at UN climate talks having won a tight election against Bolsonaro.

“We have certainty that [Lula] will protect the indigenous territories, and that he will have a ministry for indigenous people. That is a relief for us,” said Thiago Yawanawá, an indigenous activist from the Amazonian state of Acre, while waiting for Lula’s speech. 

Latin America closes ranks at Cop27 around climate finance

Other biomes could also benefit from a Lula presidency, said Shirley Krenak, an indigenous leader from the state of Minas Gerais. “We are very hopeful with the new president. It was with Lula that we had more opportunities for dialogue,” she added. 

Lula’s approach goes further. Marina Silva, a lawmaker tipped for the environment ministry, said the government does not want “an isolated protection only in Brazil. We want protection in all mega-forested countries.” 

Two days earlier, at a G20 leaders summit, Brazil signed a pact with Indonesia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo to tackle deforestation.

DRC vice-minister Eve Bazaiba hinted on Twitter this should inspire rich countries to deliver finance “proportional to the ecosystem services given to mankind”.

Contributors to the Amazon Fund froze payments during Bolsonaro’s term – but were quick to congratulate Lula on his win.

Challenge ahead 

Bolsonaro’s policies left a destructive trail in the Amazon. His administration defunded environmental protection agencies and rolled back indigenous rights and environmental protections.

A legislative package that would allow farmers to claim rainforest land is ready to vote in the Senate and could pass before Bolsonaro’s term ends.

Brazil can only protect the Amazon with consistent policies over time, the head of the Global Environmental Facility Carlos Manuel Rodríguez told Climate Home.

Silva, on her part, said she’s aware of the challenge ahead. On one hand, inflation is driving the country towards a difficult economic situation. On the other, the Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Resources saw a recent 24% slash in its budget. 

In the past, under Lula, Brazil was able to drastically reduce forest loss with its own resources, said Tasso Azevedo, former chief of the Brazilian Forest Service. The new government now has the experience to do it again, he said.

“A lot of things can be done with the right political decisions. Once they start to have results, it’s kind of easy to push for funds.”

The post Lula charms UN climate summit, bringing hope for rainforests appeared first on Climate Home News.

The vote has raised environmentalists’ hopes that the Amazon rainforest will be protected from ranchers, illegal loggers and gold miners.

While Bolsonaro gutted environmental protection agencies and oversaw a rise in deforestation, Lula’s previous tenure as president saw a steady decline in forest clearance.

Deforestation speeds up climate change as the trees and soil, particularly in untouched rainforest, suck in carbon dioxide.

“For climate, [Lula’s election] is a huge hope,” Lula’s environmental advisor and former environment minister Izabella Teixeira told Climate Home News. She said that climate action and “a new relationship between humankind and nature” are critical to Brazil’s economic development.

“We know that we need to work hard but [we] now have a president that believes and is committed not only to tackle deforestation but to move forward to make sure that [we] can promote inclusive development,” she added.

In his victory speech, Lula pledged to reduce the level of forest destruction in the Brazilian Amazon to zero. According to another former environment minister Marina Silva, Lula’s administration will turn areas of the Amazon the size of France into indigenous or nature reserves. This would introduce harsher penalties for illegal deforestation in these areas.

But Amazon campaigners warned that right-wing control of Congress and the “inertia” of rising deforestation would make this target hard to achieve.

Claudio Angelo, a spokesperson for NGO Climate Observatory, told Climate Home that right-wing forces in Congress were likely to continue to support Bolsonaro until Lula takes office on 1 January. That means lawmakers will try to pass 14 bills to further weaken environmental regulations and indigenous rights before Lula takes over.

That would “make it very, very hard for Lula to rein in deforestation, pollution and stop the massacre of indigenous peoples,” Angelo warned.

“We call those bills the ‘destruction package’ and they include permanent amnesty to land-grabbing, mining in indigenous lands and the end of environmental impact assessments,” he said.

Cop27 movers and shakers: Nine people shaping the climate agenda

More than 90% of deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon is illegal. Government agencies like Ibama are tasked with stopping it. But Bolsonaro appointed people to head the agency who refused to spend most of its budget and restricted what its employees could do.

Over the last four years, Ibama had a large budget. But Bolsonaro-appointed officials just weren’t willing to spend it on inspections and enforcement, Angelo said.

Lula’s appointees are likely to spend it in full. And Congress members associated with the centre-right Centrão coalition, which votes with whoever is in power, could even support a request to increase Ibama’s budget, Angelo said.

Environmental protection could also be funded from abroad. Until Bolsonaro came to power, Norway and Germany funded Amazon protection through the Amazon Fund. Teixeira told Climate Home the fund “will be crucial to [finance] environmental enforcement”.

In 2019, Bolsonaro abolished the fund’s technical committee and in response Norway stopped its donations. The fund has not launched a new project since Bolsonaro became president.

Following Lula’s victory, Norway’s environment minister tweeted: “Norway looks forward to revitalising our extensive climate and forest partnership with Brazil.” The leaders of Canada, Germany and Australia also mentioned climate or environmental cooperation in their congratulatory tweets.

President-elect @Lulaoficial championed the protection of the Amazon and its people throughout his campaign as well as in his acceptance speech. Norway looks forward to revitalizing our extensive climate and forest partnership with Brazil. @climateforest

— Espen Barth Eide (@EspenBarthEide) October 31, 2022

André Guimarães, director of the Amazon Environmental Research Institute (Ipam), told Climate Home that “inertia” was another challenge. “That land-grabbing that took place over the last two or three years will be generating deforestation… in the next few years,” he said.

Internationally, Lula’s administration plans to work with its Amazon neighbours by organising a summit on forest protection in early 2023. And it intends to work with the Democratic Republic of Congo and Indonesia in an alliance of rainforest nations at Cop27 next week. 

Lula’s government will update the “insufficient” 2030 climate plan that Bolsonaro put together, Teixeira previously told Climate Home. On Monday, she said: “It takes time to review and develop new deals and visions.”

Lula plans to encourage state oil company Petrobras to diversify into renewables, fertilisers and biofuels. But, he said, Petrobras should expand oil production in the short term.

Bolsonaro, who has yet to accept defeat, has for months attempted to undermine the legitimacy of Brazil’s electoral system. His loss was much narrower than polls had initially forecast and there are concerns he could challenge the results.

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Well unfortunately, the same holds true when the kids are Chinese president Xi Jinping and Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau and the project is saving the world’s wildlife and the forests and carbon that go with it.

After four years of talks, the CBD nature summit is just two months away. But the UN’s biodiversity chief told Climate Home this week that “as the plans go, we may not have the heads of state and government”.

Because of Covid-19 restrictions, the talks have been moved from China’s Kunming to Canada’s Montreal but it’s still up to China to send out the invites.

Xi is not expected to show up amid Covid fears and deteriorating relations with Canada over the arrest of a Huawei executive.

Without leaders, the event risks being ignored and overshadowed by the war in Ukraine and even the football world cup.

This week’s news…

• Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor
• EU outlines funding options to help climate victims recover
• Ugandan police ‘brutally arrest’ anti-pipeline protesters outside EU embassy
• World leaders not invited to attend critical UN biodiversity summit
• Demand response: A win-win solution to climate and energy price crises
• EU ministers back €20 billion plan to ditch Russian fossil fuels
• As Brazil’s Congress swings further right, environmentalists pin hopes on Lula

A new Brazilian government would be just the boost the talks need but nature-lovers will have to bite their nails all month after leftist Lula failed to defeat Amazon-destroying Jair Bolsonaro in the first round.

Lula is still the favourite to win on 30 October though and his environmental spokesperson told Climate Home this week that Brazil will update its “insufficient” climate plan with a focus on saving the Amazon.

“Rather than trudging in the fossil-fuel footsteps of those who went before, we can leapfrog this dirty energy and embrace the benefits of clean power”

Kenya’s new president William Ruto will not join African nations’ dash for gas

The post Odd couple bungle nature talks – Climate Weekly appeared first on Climate Home News.

The South American country of 212 million —and the world’s sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter— is headed to a second electoral round 30 October. In the running are incumbent Jair Bolsonaro and former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who led the first round of voting with 48.4% of the votes.

Izabella Teixeira, Brazil’s former environment minister under Lula and head of his environment team, promised to update country’s nationally determined contribution (NDC) to the Paris Agreement, which outlines its plans to cut emissions.

“It is evident that Brazil’s numbers today are insufficient. These will be reviewed and Brazil’s NDC will once again become an instrument for the country’s credibility for Brazilians and the international community. Brazil needs a new NDC,” she said.

Independent analysts at Climate Action Tracker rate Brazil’s latest 2030 emissions target as “almost sufficient” to hold global temperature rise below 2C. But policy action was “insufficient” to deliver, they judged, citing rising deforestation and an expanded role for fossil oil and gas in energy plans.

As Brazil’s Congress swings further right, environmentalists pin hopes on Lula

In the lead up to the election, climate activists pushed for Lula’s campaign to update Brazil’s NDC in the first 100 days of government. Teixeira declined to commit to such a deadline.

The next government first needs to revisit the technical studies that form the basis for targets in the context of development goals, she said. “We need to understand what is on the table, understand what society wants, (aim to) make a big pact, because the private sector has advanced, the financial sector has advanced.”

There is insufficient data to understand the “industrial transition” and role of Brazil’s voluntary carbon market, Teixeira added. “We can’t be irresponsible, say that we have renegotiated and delivered anything. I built the most ambitious NDC that Brazil has ever done, in 2015, and it took a year.”

If Lula wins the presidential election, he faces the challenge of rebuilding Brazil’s environmental image while working with a Congress that has swung further to the right.

Brazil proposed its first NDC in September 2015 and has updated it twice since, in 2020 and in 2022. In both updates, made under Bolsonaro’s term as president, the country used accounting tricks to weaken its climate goals.

Gap to 1.5C yawns, as most governments miss UN deadline to improve climate plans

In 2020, the country committed to a 37% emission reduction by 2025 and 43% by 2030, but changed the baseline year for the calculation. This allowed for more emissions than the previous version, violating the Paris Agreement. 

After pressure from civil society and the international community, Brazil updated its NDC in April 2022, but it still allows the emission of 73 MtCO2e more than what was first proposed in 2015. 

The revision of the NDC is one of the proposals listed in the document Brazil 2045, presented in May this year by the Climate Observatory, a network of 73 civil society organizations, for the country to go beyond carbon neutrality in 2050.

The document was delivered to all candidates except to the current president Jair Bolsonaro. For the organization, “with Bolsonaro there is no future for environmental policy in Brazil”.

Revisiting the country’s current target is a fundamental step for Brazil to rebuild trust with the international community, said Stela Herschmann, climate policy expert at the Climate Observatory. This alone is not enough, she added, as the goal must align with scientific evidence. 

“We need to present an implementation strategy, which we don’t have today. We don’t say how we are going to reach the number. We also need a long-term goal, we need to talk about adaptation and make sure that the NDC allows effective public participation”, he says.

Comment: The fate of the Amazon rests on the outcome of Brazil’s election

According to Teixeira, Lula’s priority is to curb deforestation, the country’s main source of emissions, which has surged to a decade high under Bolsonaro. 

In the last four years, deforestation in the Amazon increased by more than 50% and forest fires in the region have also increased. Environmental crimes are on the rise, including the illegal occupation of land in protected areas, invasions of indigenous territories and the assassination of indigenous leaders.

During the years 2020 and 2021, Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions increased by 9.5%. Of all emissions, 46% are due to deforestation, mainly driven by illegal mining and livestock expansion. 

Preliminary reports indicate that in 2022 deforestation will reach record levels in the Amazon region.

“Combating deforestation is an ethical question… It is not an economic activity, it is one of control and inspection. We will do this and, at the same time, design mitigation and resilience strategies,” said the former minister. 

Tackling deforestation is Brazil’s “greatest challenge” but also “its greatest opportunity”, said Herschmann. “We have a competitive advantage, a gigantic forest, and we can invest in reforestation to increase carbon reabsorption.”

The post Lula will update Brazil’s ‘insufficient’ climate plans if elected: advisor appeared first on Climate Home News.

After consistently leading in the polls against the far-right incumbent, challenger Lula, the 76-year-old former president who was first elected 20 years ago, came out on top with 48% of the votes.

The outcome wasn’t the outright majority Lula’s supporters had hoped would lead the former union leader to win in a single round.

Bolsonaro’s supporters celebrated a victory. With 43% of the votes, Bolsonaro performed better in all of Brazil’s 27 states than Ipec, one of Brazil’s largest polling firms, had predicted.

The results mean the election will go to a runoff on 30 October in one of the world’s most consequential elections ever for the climate.

At the same time, Sunday’s vote saw a surge in pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers enter the national Congress, which remains dominated by right-wing forces.

Brazilian climate analysts say the Congress makeup will remain a major obstacle for passing new climate and conservation policies. But a Lula win at the end of the month would have a greater impact in undoing four years of destructive policies in the Amazon.

Brazil election: Lula challenges Bolsonaro’s deforestation record, backs oil development

Climate and rainforest conservation issues have emerged as major issues in one of Brazil’s most polarised campaigns.

Both Lula and Bolsonaro plan to increase Brazil’s oil and gas production and proposed measures to halt deforestation to attract voters.

But Bolsonaro’s deforestation record and attacks on the rights of indigenous peoples, environmental and human right defenders, tell a radically different story. Under his term, deforestation in the Amazon rose to a 12-year high.

In contrast, deforestation fell sharply from a 2004 peak when Lula was in power from 2003 to 2010. Carlos Rittl, a Brazilian senior policy advisor at the Rainforest Foundation in Norway cited cross-government coordination, the creation of protected areas and the demarcation of indigenous reserves for the drop in forest clearance.

“There will be an abyss of difference between what we can expect from Lula’s government and Bolsonaro’s. Bolsonaro is a carbon bomb. With Lula, there is hope that the main problems that Brazil is facing will be addressed,” said Rittl.

A Lula victory would see Bolsonaro become the first incumbent president to lose a re-election bid since the start of Brazil’s modern democracy in 1988.

However, the make-up of Congress, which is notoriously fragmented with dozens of political parties represented, will make his task a lot harder.

Bolsonaro’s Liberal Party (PL) now holds 99 of the 513 seats in the lower house – the largest share and an increase of 31 seats. His party also has the highest number of seats in the upper house.

At least seven of Bolsonaro’s former ministers were also elected to Congress including Ricardo Salles, who stepped down from environment while under investigation for alleged collusion with illegal logging, and former agriculture minister Tereza Cristina.

The centre-right Centrão coalition, which allies with anyone in power, and has propped up Bolsonaro during his four years in office, remains the dominant force.

Rittl said that the high number of seats gained by pro-Bolsonaro lawmakers was in part attributed to large sums of public money being invested in their constituencies from a “secret budget”, that could be spent at the discretion of the Centrão coalition.  “It has had a much higher impact than any election funding,” he said.

There was some good news for environmental defenders. For the first time, two indigenous women, Sônia Guajajara and Célia Xakriabá, were elected to Congress’ lower house.

Comment: The fate of the Amazon rests on the outcome of Brazil’s election

If he wins at the end of the month, Lula will need to pursue coalitions with the center-right to govern and pass laws. “Of course, there will be trade-offs,” said Rittl.

Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the climate NGO coalition Climate Observatory, told Climate Home, that the right-wing dominated Congress will continue to “try and impose setbacks on the environmental agenda in Brazil”.

But a Lula victory would outweigh any obstruction by Congress, he added. That’s because Brazil’s president has a right to veto any bill or legislative proposal.

A suite of laws weakening environmental protection and indigenous rights is currently awaiting legislative approval in Congress. Astrini said a Lula government could amend their contents or, as a last resort, scrap them.

And while it might be difficult for a Lula government to pass new legislation, Brazil already has an array of climate and Amazon protection laws and regulations which the Bolsonaro administration violated or sought to reverse that could now be implemented, said Ana Toni, executive director of the Institute for Climate and Society.

“Lula would still have a lot of power to move in the direct direction,” she told Climate Home. “If Lula gets into government, keeps democracy strong and implements the laws that we have, it would be a huge achievement.”

The post As Brazil’s Congress swings further right, environmentalists pin hopes on Lula appeared first on Climate Home News.

Since coming to power January 2019, Bolsonaro has led an onslaught against the government agencies and legal frameworks designed to protect forests and Indigenous Peoples’ rights, dragging Brazil back to the wild west days we thought we’d left behind more than two decades ago.

The cost can be measured in environmental destruction and human suffering.

Deforestation in the Amazon has risen more than 50% during his presidency. Violent land conflicts and illegal invasions of Indigenous territories and other protected areas have surged. And a record number of Indigenous People have been murdered.

It’s no exaggeration then, to say that the Amazon’s fate rests on the outcome of our election on 2 October. If Bolsonaro wins another term in office the world’s biggest rainforest could pass its tipping point.

If he loses, we have the chance to bring it – and Brazil – back from the brink.

Reviving Mercosur

Bolsonaro lags in the polls behind his main rival, former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. If – as looks likely – Lula is declared president, his government will face a flood of challenges.

Reviving the trade deal that the European Union (EU) struck with the Mercosur bloc of nations – Brazil, Argentina, Paraguay and Uruguay – in 2019, is among them. The deal has potentially negative consequences for Indigenous Peoples’ rights, as well as deforestation in the Amazon, the Cerrado and our other precious biomes.

The trade deal that the EU agreed after 20 years of negotiations would cut tariffs worth billions of euros a year on goods imported into the EU from Brazil and other Mercosur nations. It stalled in 2020 however, partly over concerns it would intensify land seizures and environmental damage from producing more soy and beef. The EU proposed a side letter to the agreement with environmental guarantees, but hasn’t drafted it yet.

Lula has indicated that he wants to reopen talks on the deal, building in more climate, environmental and human rights protections. He also wants concessions from the EU on promoting the development of Brazilian industry. This could appease the industrial workers who are his historical support base. Along with many civil society groups, they have long opposed the EU-Mercosur trade deal.

The new administration must consult Brazil’s grassroots movements and civil society on the deal. Until now, the EU has paid these groups insufficient attention, despite them proving to be such an important pillar of democracy – and a bulwark against its erosion – over the past few years. Their well-founded environmental and social concerns about the deal must be addressed through concrete actions.

Dismantling Bolsonarism

The most pressing issue for us is to combat the illegal activity that Bolsonaro allowed to flourish. Under his watch, criminal gangs had a free rein to maraud the Amazon: for mining, fishing, drug trafficking and other nefarious activities.

Those perceived as obstacles to their activities – including Bruno Pereira, Dom Phillips and numerous Indigenous People, such as the forest protector Paulo Paulino Guajajara – paid the ultimate price.

Criminals operate largely with the support of corrupt local authorities. There are now 10,000 kilometres of illegal roads in the Amazon, and guns and violence have proliferated.

Those whose criminal activities have thrived under Bolsonaro are not going to simply stop because there’s a new government in place. What’s more, even if Bolsonaro accepts defeat, he will still have two or three months in office before he hands over power – enough time to wreak more havoc. This could include pushing through a number of damaging bills – including one related to using Indigenous territories for mining, one weakening the environmental licensing regulation and a land grabbing bill – all of which will increase the threat of deforestation in the Amazon, and turn currently illegal activities into legal ones.

In short, the current regime will still have a lot of power, both with their guns on the ground and in Congress.

Despite all this, in Brazilian civil society there is a feeling of hope and pride.

Hope for the democratic future of our country. Pride because Bolsonaro wasn’t able to achieve half of what he wanted, largely due to the resistance and strength of civil society activists and others.

Adriana Ramos coordinates the policy and law program of the Instituto Socioambiental (ISA). She is an NGO representative on the guidance committee of the Amazon Fund and coordinates the Brazilian NGO Forum working group on forests.

The post The fate of the Amazon rests on the outcome of Brazil’s election appeared first on Climate Home News.

Former leftist president, Luiz Inácio “Lula” da Silva, leads the polls against the current president Jair Bolsonaro, who is seeking reelection. More than 156 million people are registered to vote on 2 October for the first electoral round.

Despite Bolsonaro’s destructive policies towards the Amazon rainforest, both he and Lula have incorporated proposals to halt deforestation, in an effort to attract concerned voters.

More than in previous years, the climate crisis has become a significant voter priority for this election, analysts told Climate Home News.

The South American country of 212 million people is the world’s sixth largest greenhouse gas emitter and home to most of the Amazon rainforest, which has experienced rising deforestation and extreme wildfires in the last four years.

Colombia’s new president calls for debt swap to protect the Amazon

In the case of all major candidates, avoiding climate action in their plans would be a “political suicide”, given the global and national context, said Thales Castro, head of the Political Science Program at the Catholic University of Pernambuco (Unicap).

Bolsonaro’s government plan proposes the use of green bonds and carbon credits to finance emissions reductions, as well as hiring 6,000 firefighters to control extreme wildfires.

The document says he’ll seek to accelerate “actions to reduce” emissions, and adds that Brazil can be a “provider of climate solutions and establishing itself as a world leader in a global green supply chain”.

But Bolsonaro’s deforestation record and his support for large agribusiness show that these proposals cannot be taken seriously, said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the climate NGO coalition Observatório do Clima.

Under his term, deforestation in the Amazon rose to a 12-year high. After this data was revealed by Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, he denied it and sacked the head of the space agency.

Lula has a more positive conservation record as president 2003-2011, but if elected will face the challenge of undoing some of Bolsonaro’s legislation, said Cynthia Suassuna, climate policy researcher at Unicap. For example, a “land-grab” bill that legitimises squatters who raze Amazon rainforest for cattle ranches or soy plantations, which has passed the lower house of parliament and is on the government priority list for a Senate vote before the election.

The former president’s platform includes strengthening environmental institutions weakened by Bolsonaro’s presidency, providing “green” farm loans and meeting Brazil’s Paris Agreement goals.

On fossil fuels, Lula – like Bolsonaro – supports increasing production. His plan calls for development of the “pre-salt”, an abundant reserve of high quality petroleum found near Brazil’s shores.

“It’s necessary to expand the production capacity of (petroleum) derivatives in Brazil, taking advantage of the great wealth of the pre-salt, with prices that take into account the production costs in Brazil,” Lula’s plan reads.

Thanks to its abundant hydropower capacity, Brazil has a relatively clean electricity, with fossil fuels representing only 12% of the generation mix. However, Brazil is a major oil exporter and Latin America’s top producer.

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The declaration was made as part of the court’s first climate change ruling, which ordered the Brazilian government to fully reactivate its national climate fund.

“Treaties on environmental law are a type of human rights treaty and, for that reason, enjoy supranational status. There is therefore no legally valid option to simply omit to combat climate change,” the ruling said.

The judgment last week was the culmination of a lawsuit filed two years ago against the Brazilian federal government by four political parties: the Workers’ Party, Socialism and Liberty Party, Brazilian Socialist Party and Sustainability Network.

They pointed out that the climate fund (Fundo Clima) set up in 2009 as part of Brazil’s national climate policy plan was inoperative in 2019; annual plans had not been prepared and money had not been disbursed to support projects that mitigate climate change.  

The court held a public hearing in September 2020, which included scientists, academics and people representing civil society and Indigenous groups.

In the judgment, endorsed by ten out of 11 presiding justices, Justice Luís Roberto Barroso noted the huge increase in deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon in 2021 – a problem that has shown no sign of slowing down. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest carbon emitter and deforestation is its largest source of emissions.

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The Supreme Court recognised the climate fund as the main tool available to cut Brazil’s emissions. Not using it was therefore a breach “by omission” of the national constitution, which requires the state to protect the environment for current and future generations.

The judgment notes that the government “hurriedly” resumed some of the climate fund’s activities after the legal challenge was filed, but not all. It ordered the state to properly reactivate the fund, prepare and present annual plans for allocating resources and disburse funds to projects.

The Brazilian government has been approached for comment.

Brazil is one of the global hotspots for climate litigation outside the US, Australia and Europe, but this was the first case that had made it to the country’s Supreme Court.  

The court has yet to rule on at least two other climate lawsuits. One calls for proper implementation of the Action Plan for Prevention and Control of Deforestation in the Amazon, a package of measures and financial directives agreed in 2004 by the federal government to combat Amazonian deforestation and degradation.

Another challenges the government’s failure to properly manage the Amazon Fund, a forest preservation initiative created in 2008. International funding for it has declined since the election of Jair Bolsonaro as president.

On a mission: Evangelicals flock to the Amazon home of isolated tribes

The cases have all been brought by political parties because it is the only way allegations of fundamental rights breaches can be heard directly at the Supreme Court.

Caio Borges, law and climate portfolio manager at the Instituto Clima e Sociedade (iCS) in Brazil, told Climate Home that the court’s declaration that the Paris Agreement is a human rights treaty gives it legal status above national law. “So in future cases, if there is a challenge to a policy or a law in relation to the Paris Agreement, then the courts will apply this understanding and there will be a presumption that the government will need to demonstrate that the challenge law is not in conflict with [it].”

Coming in the same week as the US Supreme Court’s decision to hamper the power of its Environmental Protection Agency to regulate carbon emissions, the Brazilian ruling could also have implications outside its own borders.

Borges noted that human rights organisations had been unhappy with the final text of the Paris Agreement, which relegated explicit mention of human rights to the preamble. “So having a constitutional court qualifying the Paris Agreement as a human rights treaty may spur a global movement for the courts to follow suit in that recognition.”

The post Brazilian court world’s first to recognise Paris Agreement as human rights treaty appeared first on Climate Home News.

Under the plan, Brazil pledged to cut emissions 50% between 2005 and 2030 – up from 43% previously. A goal of 37% emissions cuts by 2025 remains.

The document describes the plan as “one of the most ambitious in the world”. But a revision to the 2005 baseline means the updated plan allows higher emissions in 2030 than Brazil’s first Paris pledge. The difference is equivalent to the annual emissions of Colombia, the Talanoa Institute calculates.

This “is against the spirit of the Paris Agreement,” Caio Borges, of Brazil’s Climate and Society Institute told Climate Home News.

Under the 2015 Paris deal and last year’s Glasgow Pact, countries are expected to progressively strengthen their climate targets.

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Brazil’s environment minister Joaquim Leite announced the 50% target during Cop26 climate talks last November. A document confirming this was submitted to the UN following a visit by Cop26 president Alok Sharma at the end of March.

Brazil has been under pressure to step up its climate plan after a first update to its 2030 target in December 2020 effectively weakened the country’s ambition.

At the time, Brazil confirmed the previously indicative target of cutting emissions 43% by 2030, while inflating the emissions baseline for 2005. The higher baseline, largely due to changes in the way forest destruction was accounted for, meant that Brazil could continue to increase its emissions while still reaching its 2030 target.

Climate Action Tracker downgraded Brazil’s scoring from “insufficient” to “highly insufficient” to meet the Paris goals.

Source: Observatório do Clima

“The new target is a failed attempt by the Bolsonaro administration to fix the mess,” the Brazilian Climate Observatory, a coalition of NGOs, said in a statement.

While it increases the nominal goal to 50% of emissions cuts, the plan uses the most recent and accurate emissions inventory for 2005, which is lower than the one used in 2020 but higher than the one in 2015.

Although an improvement on the 2020 update, this would still allow Brazil’s emissions to rise beyond the goal it set itself in 2016.

“This is like having credit card debt and only paying part of the bill,” said Marcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory. “It’s still a step backwards, at a time when the United Nations is calling for countries to increase their ambitions.”

To match the ambition level of Brazil’s 2016 plan, taking into account the country’s latest inventory update, would require a commitment to cut emissions 49% by 2025 and 53% by 2030, according to the Talanoa Institute analysis.

Costa Rica’s ‘leave it in the ground’ policy in doubt after election

Sectoral pledges made at Cop26 on cutting methane emissions and achieving zero deforestation by 2030 are not reflected in the updated plan and civil society wasn’t consulted.

The Brazilian government argues that the same methodological modification that increased the 2005 baseline could also increase the volume of emissions in 2030. But “a systematic legal interpretation of the Paris Agreement reveals that nothing in the agreement indicates that a country is allowed to move backwards in its ambition,” Borges said.

The update to Brazil’s climate plan comes as deforestation is rising and the government is planning an expansion of oil and gas drilling across the country – emboldened by international sanctions on Russia and demand for alternative sources.

“Brazil is opening new oil frontiers such as the onshore exploration in the Amazon and offshore in the river mouth,” where it could take a decade for production to start, Ilan Zugman, 350.org’s Latin America managing director, told Climate Home.

On Wednesday, the National Petroleum Agency (ANP) opened the auction of 379 oil and gas exploration areas, against opposition from local fishing communities and indigenous people.

The auction is taking place in addition to a permanent bidding process for 1,068 drilling blocks covering 462,500 square kilometers – an area 15 times as big as Belgium.

The post Brazil accused of backsliding in updated climate pledge to UN appeared first on Climate Home News.

Living at the border between cerrado and the Amazon forest, in the municipality of Brasnorte (586 kilometres Northwest of Cuiabá), the Manokis almost disappeared after first coming in contact with whites. But their numbers have begun growing again over the last few decades and while they fight to recover their original territory, they have become one of the indigenous people who have resorted to soybean production for income.

Growing soybeans and other large mechanized crops has become the main proposition for indigenous peoples under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has historically opposed land demarcation and has even tried to revoke some indigenous land rights, which cover about 13% of Brazil’s territory.

Bolsonaro’s policy has raised fears that opening indigenous territories to large scale crop cultivation will increase deforestation. Indigenous territories have only a 2% deforestation rate. They are better preserved than all categories of protected areas, including national parks.

Fierce opponents of Bolsonaro’s, the Manokis claim that it is possible to reconcile mechanized agriculture with conservation.

The Manokis’  incursion into the production of Brazil’s major agricultural commodity began in 2004, after a decision taken jointly with the Parecis, a neighbouring indigenous people. That year the Manokis cut down 1,000 hectares of cerrado, equivalent to 2.2% of their territory. Now, 17 years later, the expanse of land they cultivate has not changed. It is the opposite of what happens on neighbouring fazendas (large plantations), where practically no native vegetation remains.

For years the Manoki, Parecis and Nambikwara flouted the law to grow soybeans. In addition to not having environmental licensing, the land was leased to fazendeiros (large plantation owners), and genetically modified crops were grown. Both of these practices are forbidden by legislation on indigenous lands.

This continued until December 2019, when the Coopihanama cooperative, involving the three peoples, and the Coopermatsene, belonging only to the Parecis, signed a TAC (Adjustment of Conduct Agreement) with the MPF (Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office) to regulate mechanized farming in their territories.

Among other things, the cooperatives undertook not to lease out their lands nor plant genetically modified crops and to seek funding from official institutions. Indigenous affairs agency Funai and environmental regulator Ibama subscribed to the agreement.

“It is a project we want to take to the entire country, so that this way they (the indigenous peoples) can gain income and greater dignity,” said the president of Funai, Federal Police chief and former advisor to the landowners’ caucus in Congress Marcelo Xavier. His speech can be found in a Funai institutional video filmed in April inside a rice harvester, alongside a Bakairi indigenous person, in Mato Grosso state.

Unlike their Parecis neighbours, whose leaders often appear in public beside Bolsonaro in public and even live-streamed Facebook lives, the Manoki do not see the government as an ally. Far from it: in August they sent representatives to Brasília to protest against a court ruling in the government’s favour. participate in the camp of protesters following the judgement of the “marco temporal” (“time frame”) in the STF (the high court).

From the Manoki’s perspective, the regularisation of mechanized farming came about as the result of a lengthy process of negotiation started by the region’s indigenous peoples under the Coopihanama cooperative.

“In my view, this is a crazy government that knows nothing about Indians’ life. On the one hand, it’s in favour of agriculture. But I’m not taken in by his words, no way,” says the chief of the Manoki, Manoel Kanunxi, 71. “I haven’t fought the president expecting him to give me support. I haven’t fought any candidate, deputy, senator, mayor or councilman.”

The Manoki say they don’t want to expand the deforested area. Neither do they engage in the white man’s agribusiness, they say. For them, mechanized farming, which this year has included off-season crops of corn, is the only way they have found to fund their medical expenses, transport and other needs created by contact with kewa [white people].

Their mechanized farming employs only four Manoki on a permanent basis, although this number goes up at harvest time. They learned to operate the machines working on neighbouring fazendas or taking courses. On the days when Climate Home News was at the site, they were spreading agricultural lime to balance the soil. The only white man present was a hired technician. For the Manoki, hiring a kewa employee is something to be proud of.

Last year their mechanized farming yielded R$ 700,000 ($12,800), which would be shared among the Manoki (a population estimated at nearly 500 individuals). The amounts allotted, approved in an assembly, were decided based on a calculation that includes each family unit and a per capita sum.

“I don’t eat soybeans. But we are putting these soybeans on the market so as to survive this way, so we can buy medicines and pay for private medical tests. We’ve found out that you have to pay for everything you use,” says Kanunxi.

The chief mentions his own wife’s treatment, which had to paid for with the income from soybeans – she needed a pacemaker in her heart. “It’s tough, but it has been worth it. If it weren’t for this, my wife would have died.”

The main reason the Manoki are unhappy with Bolsonaro is the president’s refusal to demarcate Indian lands. This is the greatest priority for their people, who have been fighting for three decades to expand their territory by 206,000 hectares of forested area that is part of the Manoki’s traditional habitat.

The official decisions so far have favoured their claim, but it is a lengthy process. In 2009 the Justice Ministry published an ordinance ratifying the expansion, but its official recognition was never signed by the president, and landowners are currently contesting the expansion in federal courts.

On the days when Climate Home was in the indigenous land, the Manoki were following with apprehension the judgment in the “marco temporal” case in Brazil’s supreme court. Supported by Bolsonaro and the landowners’ caucus, the so-called “time frame” thesis is that only lands that were occupied by indigenous peoples in 1988, when the present Constitution went into effect, should be demarcated.

The indigenous peoples’ territorial claims are based on extensive historic documentation, including reports presented by Marshal Rondon (1865-1958), who collected information and documented the massacre perpetrated by rubber tappers against the Manoki in 1900, marking the beginning of their contact with whites.

“Can any Brazilian soul not tremble as one with ours on learning that the entire population of men, women and children was burned to death inside their huts set on fire?”, the military officer wrote in 1922, a few years after he led an expedition through the Amazon with US president Theodore Roosevelt

In the mid-fifties, after suffering from outbreaks of Korean flu, measles and typhus, besides attacks from neighbouring peoples – themselves pressured by the arrival of the rubber tappers – most of the Manoki, including Kanunxi, allowed themselves to be convinced by the Jesuits to leave their lands. They went to live in the Anchieta mission, beside the majestic Utiariti waterfall, in the land of the Parecis.

On the one hand, the Manoki were safe from their enemies and received medical attention. But the strict school system, which jumbled members of different peoples together and kept boys and girls apart, made the Portuguese language compulsory. This is why only the elders speak Manoki today.

In 1968 the Manoki moved to the Irantxe Indigenous Land, an area of 45,500 hectares demarcated that year. At the time their numbers were reduced to around 50 individuals.

This area lies on the left bank of the Cravari River, where the vegetation is mainly cerrado, but their traditional territory is on the right bank, covered in forest. This was not a problem to begin with, as they wandered all over the region.

But from 1969 three fazendas sprung up with funds subsidized by Sudam (Superintendence for the Development of the Amazon Region). According to the Brasnorte council, the region began to be settled on a large scale from 1978 onwards, with the arrival of families coming from the west of Paraná.

In a few short years, the Manoki found themselves hemmed in by soybean plantations and pasturelands. Of the territory they claim as their own, 40,700 hectares of forest have already been destroyed. One of the landowners cut down the forest right to the banks of the Cravari, close to two waterfalls that are sacred to the Manoki. He even built a small hydroelectrical plant on the site, without an environmental license. The plant was dismantled after pressure from the Indians.

Should the supreme court approve the “marco temporal”, the Manoki would lose the right to retake their traditional land. The judgment on the case has been halted indefinitely after a request for inspection made by chief justice Alexandre de Moraes.

“A people that doesn’t have a demarcated territory can’t live as a people. The struggle began with our grandparents, our great-grandparents. The ‘marco temporal’ is the destruction of the indigenous peoples. The government says we have to integrate with society. But we don’t need to integrate – we need to interact. If you integrate, you stop being who you are to live in a different way. You forget your language, your roots and your territory,” says schoolteacher Edivaldo Mampuche Manoki, 34.

Another problem for the Manoki was the construction of the Bocaiúva Small Hydroelectric Plant, in operation since 2010. Because of the dam, fish species such as pacu and matrinxã, which were part of the Manoki’s food supply, have disappeared from the Cravari.

“It has had a tremendous and irreversible impact,” says schoolteacher Claudionor Iranxe. “Of course there was compensation, but not enough to offset what it has done to our people’s traditional food self-sufficiency.”

Questioned about the impact, the company that controls the plant, Sileia Participações, said: “There is no technical basis to establish this cause and effect relationship, in other words, to say that the construction of the project has been the cause of the disappearance of species of the icthyofauna.”

The environmental degradation surrounding the plant forces the Manoki to travel tens of kilometres to hunt and fish, activities related to preparations for their traditional feasts. In many cases the landowners don’t allow them to enter these areas.

In their present territory, besides soybeans, the Manoki sow their traditional crops such as yams, bananas and potatoes, as well as having fruit trees and vegetable gardens. Almost all the preparation of the land in these areas is done by hand. They are also starting to produce honey and farm fish.

Many families produce handicrafts. A Manoki cotton hammock can take up to three months to make. And some of them work for the public sector in the education and health areas.

All the villages except one are located far away from the soybean plantation. Their houses, made of wood or cement, are simple and similar in style but have running water, electricity and connection to the internet.

“As far as I am concerned, I want to forget this crop [soybeans]. It is not going to feed our people. It will help occasionally when needed. But we can’t live off this crop,” says the president of the Watoholi Association, Paulo Sérgio Kapynxi, 52.

“What we need to do is grow things without poison, have our livestock, make manioc meal. When we have to pay for surgery or buy an expensive medication, then we’ll remember the plantation. But in the meantime, let’s forget it”.

Translated from Portuguese by Clara Allain

The post On the edge of the Amazon, Manoki people grow soy and fight for land rights appeared first on Climate Home News.

Environmentalists celebrated Salles’ exit but asked why it had taken president Jair Bolsonaro so long to give him the push. His replacement, Joaquim Leite, is an ally and Bolsonaro remains in favour of opening up the Amazon rainforest to business.

Salles has been environment minister since Bolsonaro came to power in January 2019. In that time, the rate of deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon increased.

Claudio Angelo, from the Climate Observatory NGO, said: “Salles was certainly a nasty symptom, but his removal leaves the disease untouched: Jair Bolsonaro is the key formulator of Brazil’s policy of environmental dismantling, and that shall remain essentially the same until the last day of his government”.

In April 2021, the top Federal police officer in the Amazonas region of Brazil accused Salles of having formed “a partnership” with the timber sector “in an attempt to obstruct the investigation of environmental crimes”.

The next month, the Brazilian Supreme Court ordered police to investigate Salles. They searched Salles’ bank and tax records and discovered “suspicious transactions” including an “extremely atypical movement” of R14m ($2.6m) involving Salles’ law firm, according to national media reports.

Salles refused to hand over his mobile phone to police, in defiance of a court order. The probe is ongoing and Salles has denied any wrongdoing, saying the investigation was “unnecessary” and “exaggerated”.

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro praised Salles, saying: “The marriage of agriculture and the environment was almost perfect. Congratulations, Ricardo Salles. It is not easy to occupy your ministry.”

pic.twitter.com/Hk8ylQaRrv

— Ricardo Salles MMA (@rsallesmma) May 15, 2021

But the next day, Salles resigned. Brazilian magazine Veja reports that the Supreme Court was about to release a “bombshell” in its investigation and Salles may have been required to send his mobile phone to US authorities to unlock its password. The organisation Salles is accused of colluding with smuggled illegal timber to the USA.

Environmentalists said Leite, who was reportedly appointed on Salles’s recommendation, has similar views to his former boss.

Former environment minister Izabella Teixera told Climate Home News: “He’s a man that comes from agriculture sector – doesn’t have experience on environmental institutions and also joined Salles to discuss carbon markets.”

Claudio Angelo, from the Brazilian NGO Climate Observatory, called him “a carbon cowboy with close ties to agribusiness who will hardly change anything”.

Carlos Rittl, a Brazilian researcher at the Potsdam Institute, said he “has roots in the same archaic ruralism where Salles came from, that looks at forests and forest dwellers with 17th-century eyes: as obstacles to be taken out of its way.”

A logging yard and dock in the Amazon. There is no suggestion of criminality by those pictured. (Photo: Greenpeace/Daniel Beltra)

While Brazil’s domestic environmental policy is not expected to change, Teixera said Leite would have less power than Salles and the foreign ministry was likely to gain more control of climate talks.

Under pressure from the political centre, Bolsonaro recently replaced his climate-denying foreign minister Ernest Araujo with a career diplomat Carlos Alberto França, who has tried to re-integrate Brazil with multilateral organisations like the UN.

Led by Salles, Brazil’s climate negotiation team blocked progress on talks to establish common rules for carbon markets at the last UN climate conference in Madrid, Spain, in 2019, by refusing provisions that would prevent the double counting of emission reductions.

While at the summit, Salles trolled fellow delegates by tweeting a photo of a meat platter “to offset our Cop emissions”. Demand for beef is a major driver of Amazon deforestation, as trees are cleared for cattle ranching.

According to Veja and the Guardian, controversial talks between the US State Department and the Brazilian government had been suspended after the second investigation into Salles was announced. The State Department told Climate Home News last Friday that the talks were “continuing”.

The post Months after criminal probes launched, Brazilian environment minister quits appeared first on Climate Home News.

On the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised to mobilise $20 billion in private and public money to stop “tearing down” the Amazon, warning of “significant economic consequences” otherwise — comments slammed by Bolsonaro as “disastrous and unnecessary”.

Now, Biden and Bolsonaro’s officials are negotiating a deal, in a key year for international climate action. Both leaders are expected to speak at a US-hosted climate summit next Thursday.

“As we lead up to the President’s Leaders Summit on Climate, we want to see a very clear commitment to ending illegal deforestation,” a US State Department official told Climate Home News, and “tangible steps to increase effective enforcement of illegal deforestation”. The US believes Brazil can achieve a “real decrease” in deforestation by the end of the 2021 fire season.

The spokesperson continued: “We continue to recognize that conservation and sustainable economic growth can go hand in hand. It is a complex challenge that also will require new and innovative solutions – solutions that include local community engagement, including indigenous and traditional communities, as well as new technologies and approaches to providing incentives.”

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At the same time, US officials have engaged directly with indigenous leaders in Brazil, who complain their interests in the region are ignored or attacked by their own government.

On Monday, eight Brazilian indigenous leaders spoke online to Jonathan Pershing, the US official in charge of the negotiations, and US ambassador Todd Chapman. Dinamam Tuxá, executive co-ordinator of Brazil’s Indigenous People Articulation, was at the meeting.

Tuxá told Climate Home News: “We shared a lot of concern with climate change and the current situation around the conservation of the forest. They said it was a moment to listen to indigenous people because they understand the importance of indigenous peoples in protecting the forest and addressing climate change.”

Indigenous leaders called on US companies to stop buying products linked to Amazon deforestation and the US to pressure the Brazilian government to give indigenous people autonomy over their land.

The US state department spokesperson said: “We encourage indigenous and Brazilian government leaders to continue constructive dialogues on the environment.” But Tuxá said: “There is no dialogue with the indigenous peoples of Brazil. That’s not because the indigenous people refuse to speak but because Brazilian government policy does not allow for this to happen… the Brazilian government is not worried about indigenous peoples and protecting the forests”.

Na carta, os indígenas lembram que a conservação das florestas é maior nos territórios indígenas, mencionam seu “papel estratégico e fundamental para a preservação da Amazônia”.
Via Valor Econômico.

SAIBA MAIS NO SITE DA APIB: https://t.co/DaSIJSBOJ4
#ApibOficial pic.twitter.com/IgyEbNhNnz

— Dinamam Tuxá (@Dinamam) April 12, 2021

Carlos Rittl, a former director of the Climate Observatory NGO, said the US “needs to be aware that they are negotiating with a government that declared war against the Amazon and indigenous people, who are seeing their forests invaded by environmental criminals, their leader being murdered and their elders dying from Covid-19”.

Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro has repeatedly made racist comments about indigenous people. In the 1990s, he said indigenous people should have been decimated in Brazil like they were in the USA. In 2020, he said indigenous people “are increasingly becoming human beings just like us”.

Bolsonaro has encouraged mining on protected indigenous lands, refused to grant land rights to indigenous people and overseen a disastrous response to Covid-19, which is hitting indigenous communities hard. In 2019, Global Witness said 24 Brazilian environmental activists were killed including indigenous Emyra Waiãpi and Firmino and Raimundo Guajajara.

Joe Biden’s $1.2bn budget for Green Climate Fund falls short of campaigner demands

Over 200 Brazilian NGOs have warned the US against giving money to Bolsonaro’s government without strict conditions.

One is the Climate Observatory. Its director Marco Astrini said: “Brazil is today a divided country. On one side there are indigenous peoples, quilombolas [descendants of former slaves], scientists, environmentalists and other people that fight for life and against deforestation. On the other side is the Bolsonaro regime, threatening human rights and democracy and [putting] the Amazon [at] risk. Biden must pick a side.”

But the Brazilian government, led by environment minister Ricardo Salles, has resisted conditions on the funding. Salles has said he wants $1bn in aid in order to reduce deforestation by 30-40%. 

According to Brazilian newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo, Salles’s presentation to US negotiators featured a dog looking hungrily at a rotisserie chicken through a shop window. Above the chickens, who had dollar signs on their chests, were the words “expectation of payment”. In this metaphor, the Brazilian government is the dog and US finance the inaccessible meat.

Izabella Teixera was the environment minister between 2010 and 2016. She told Climate Home News that giving $1bn a year in aid would not solve the problem. Over 90% of Brazilian deforestation is illegal, she noted, saying there shouldn’t be financial conditions on stopping environmental crime. She added that Brazil had financial support to tackle deforestation through the Amazon Fund, until the Bolsonaro government’s policies led major donors Norway and Germany to freeze their support.

To avoid supporting Bolsonaro’s federal government, campaigners are hoping that the US will give funding to the Legal Amazon, a consortium of nine Amazon regional states. “That would be a smart move,” said André Guimarães, director of Amazon research group IPAM. “[The Legal Amazon] have put together a pretty comprehensive deforestation combat plan.”

The states of the ‘legal amazon’. (Photo: OS2 Warp/WikiCommons)

Dinamam Tuxá said that indigenous peoples generally had a better relationship with state governments than with Brasilia. “There’s usually mutual respect and dialogue,” he said. “In some states, we’ve worked together to build a strong power to fight deforestation.”

But Teixera said sub-national governments’ relationships with foreign states was a “very sensitive issue” in international diplomacy. When Teixera was in government, Germany gave money to individual Brazilian states like Acre but this was only possible with the federal government’s approval, she said.

Today’s federal government was not inviting regional governors to talks, she said, but “there are other ways – not necessarily government to government – but you can have with philanthropy, institutions… to promote projects at sub-national level”.

The rate of deforestation has risen since Bolsonaro was elected. This has contributed to fires which made international headlines in 2019, sparking a war of words between Bolsonaro and French president Emmanuel Macron and endangering a trade deal between the EU and South America.

The Brazilian government’s response has been a military operation in the Amazon. Guimarães said this had been “a little bit effective”. Its ban on setting fires had shown results and the army had played an important part in the successful fight against deforestation in the 2000s. 

But the army was “only one piece of the puzzle”, he said, with other policies driving deforestation up. Bolsonaro has defunded and defanged Ibama, the agency charged with enforcing environmental regulations, and said the Amazon should be opened up to development. “It’s quite schizophrenic,” Guimarães said.

The post In Amazon protection talks, US demands action from Bolsonaro appeared first on Climate Home News.

Brazil revealed the “indicative” goal in an updated submission to the UN on Wednesday, but did not match it with increased ambition in the coming decade. The targets of reducing emissions 37% by 2025 and 43% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, remain unchanged. Brazil is the world’s fifth largest emitter and deforestation is its largest source of emissions, according to Climate Action Tracker. 

“Brazil announces an insufficient and immoral climate target,” NGO network Climate Observatory said in a statement. “[The 2030 target] would take us to a world about 3C warmer if all countries had the same ambition.”

While other major emitters, such as Japan and South Korea, have ramped up their climate ambition in recent months by adopting 2050 net zero targets, Brazil has failed to step up by delaying action until 2060 and not setting ambitious interim targets, Climate Observatory said. “The world has changed, but Brazil’s goals have not.”

Brazil: Bolsonaro’s attack on the Amazon breaches constitution, climate lawyers argue

To meet the Paris Agreement climate goals, Climate Observatory said Brazil should reduce its emissions by 81% by 2030, compared to 2005 levels, and set a net zero target for 2050.

Under Bolsonaro’s administration, deforestation of the Amazon rainforest has surged to a 12-year high. Last month, Brazil’s space agency reported that between August 2019 and July 2020, 6,890 square miles of rainforest were destroyed, a 9.5% increase compared to the previous year.

Under the Paris Agreement, Brazil previously committed to crack down on all illegal deforestation by 2030 and restore 12 million hectares of forests. The latest submission did not reiterate that pledge or use the word “deforestation”. In 2019, during Bolsonaro’s first full year in office, there was a 34% increase in deforestation.

Brazilian environmentalist Carlos Rittl tweeted: “If Brazil’s democracy survives… Bolsonaro’s government till 2060, Brazilian forests won’t.”

Amazon under Bolsonaro: Landless Brazilians are invading more and more protected areas

In its new climate plan, Brazil said that it would use carbon credits to achieve its 2060 target and that as of 2021 it would require “at least $10 billion per year to address the numerous challenges it faces”. Climate Observatory described this condition as “yet another attempt to blackmail rich countries”.

“This sounds like an outrageous ‘no money, no forests’ message that would have zero chances of success,” said Rittl, who works at Germany’s Institute for Advanced Sustainability Studies.

Brazil called for negotiations on a new international carbon market to be urgently resolved, saying the Paris goals would be “seriously jeopardized” otherwise.

Last year a coalition of 31 countries said that carbon market rules pursued by Brazil made the 1.5C temperature goal of the Paris Agreement unattainable. Brazil has pushed back against rules that prevent the double counting of emissions reductions and wants to keep trading carbon credits which fall under the old Kyoto-era Clean Development Mechanism (CDM), on a new carbon market set up under the Paris Agreement. 

Experts say this move risks flooding the market with carbon credits of no value and undermining global efforts to slash emissions.

This article was updated on 10/12 to clarify that the new submission did not mention deforestation.

The post Brazil sets ‘indicative’ goal of carbon neutrality by 2060 appeared first on Climate Home News.

I was among the critics who argued that slashing tariffs on goods imported into the EU from Brazil, Argentina, Uruguay and Paraguay, would fuel demand for Brazilian commodities that could lead to additional deforestation if proper safeguards were not in place.

In the 18 months since, opposition to the Mercosur Agreement has intensified, both in Europe and Brazil.

From European campaigners to Brazilian Indigenous groups, and from countries to parliaments, there has been outrage at the soaring deforestation in the Amazon, along with the devastating fires which have swept through there two years in a row. These environmental atrocities have run in tandem with social crimes: as Brazil has witnessed an increasing number of violent land grabs and murders of a record number of Indigenous Peoples.

Underpinning these events is the perilous course charted by the Brazilian government, led by President Jair Bolsonaro, which has reduced the country’s environmental protections and led proposals to open Indigenous’ Peoples’ lands for commercial use.

But how much more damage is the Mercosur deal really likely to cause?

The agreement — which took 20 years to negotiate — still needs to be signed by the European Council, approved by the European Parliament, and then ratified by the national parliaments of EU member states, and this question will be central to their deliberations.

Bolsonaro’s attack on the Amazon breaches Brazil’s constitution, climate lawyers argue

Two studies, one conducted by the London School of Economics (LSE) for the European Commission, released in July, and one by the Commission Ambec for France, published in September, have both identified the trade deal’s likely negative impact.

While the estimates vary across the studies, they are clear that the severity of the environmental impact in Brazil will grow without an effective approach to environmental and human rights protections in the country. A new study by researchers hired by the Brazilian NGO Imazon goes further, suggesting that other experts have underestimated the impact of efforts in Brazil to weaken environmental safeguards and undermine Indigenous rights to their land.

The new study also asks where deforestation is most likely to occur as a direct result of the Mercosur deal, with a focus on Brazil’s Amazon and Cerrado regions.

Ultimately free trade agreements reverberate in local communities: in the individual lives of men, women and children, and in the destruction of the unique patches of forest and habitats which surround them.  Knowing the territories at greatest risk of deforestation under different circumstances, helps provide the insights necessary to prevent it.

The research team that Imazon pulled together found that many of the areas at greatest risk of deforestation from increases in agricultural activity border Indigenous territories. The dismantling of protections for these territories will make it harder than ever for communities to resist invasion and deforestation on their lands.

The study also found that the risk of additional deforestation is greatest in areas where recent deforestation has been high – specifically the eastern and southern portions of the Brazilian Amazon biome in the States of Pará, Mato Grosso and Rondônia.

Landless Brazilians are invading more and more protected areas of the Amazon

It’s impossible to separate the impact that this trade deal will have in Brazil, while ignoring the influence of laws, policies, environmental standards and governance. So the study also weighs up the impact the trade pact will have under different policy governance scenarios.

My co-authors and I found that without strong anti-deforestation protections and good governance, the scale of additional deforestation in Brazil more than doubles. This bodes ill for the forests and forest peoples of Brazil, should the trade agreement move forward as written.

The Imazon study adds more detail to the already compelling body of evidence on the potential impacts of the pact on forests and the communities that depend on them for their livelihoods.

To address these concerns, the EU and Mercosur countries’ trading relationship should be revised to insist that companies seeking market access commit to respecting international standards on the environment and human rights. To this end, the agreement should include robust and enforceable measures.

Brazil is currently on track to miss its own National Climate Change policy targets. Before the EU considers its trade deal with Mercosur, in any form, the country’s surging deforestation trends must be reversed, and rates brought at least in line with the country’s own targets.

In the words of Kretã Kaingang, of the Articulation of Indigenous Peoples of Brazil (APIB): “We have to make it clear, when the forests burn, indigenous lives are lost. This treaty increases the threats to our lives, to our culture, and way of living. This deal will bring fire, destruction, and more illegal loggers to our territories.”

Paulo Barreto is a senior researcher at Imazon, a Brazil-based independent non-profit organisation which promotes conservation and sustainable development in the Amazon 

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The environmentalists are seeking a court order on the government to reduce deforestation by 60% in 2021, in line with the national policy on climate change. If this target is missed, campaigners say deforestation should stop completely for a year.

In 2019, the Brazilian government abandoned its main anti-deforestation plan, known as PPCDAm. In the same year, president Jair Bolsonaro’s first full year in office, there was a 34% increase in deforestation.

The NGOs bringing the case argue that the scrapping of PPCDAm breached the Brazilian constitution. Article 225  states “all have the right to an ecologically balanced environment” and says the government has a duty to “defend and preserve it for present and future generations”.

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

They also argue deforestation breaches Brazil’s international commitments. Greenpeace Brazil’s climate and justice co-ordinator Fabiana Alves said: “Even under a totally unambitious contribution to the international Paris Agreement, Brazil is now lacking public policy, budget and staffing to guarantee the application of our national laws. We need to stop this free fall.”

Caio Borges is the coordinator of the Instituto Clima e Sociedade’s legal programme. He told Climate Home he is aware of six ongoing legal cases against the government’s deforestation policies in the last six months. Four of these are in the Supreme Court and two are in lower courts. “They complement each other in many aspects and have some overlaps,” he said.

In this case, Borges said he expects the court to rule “that there is a systemic failure by the government to fulfill its constitutional duties and obligations on the protection of the right to a healthy environment and that a major risk posed by such omission is the exacerbation of climate change impacts on vulnerable groups, the protected biomes and biodiversity”.

What the Supreme Court will order the government to do though is an open question, Borges said. “If a systematic violation of constitutionally protected rights is found, then the court could step in to correct the state failure, ordering things such as the development of action plans to curb deforestation, compulsory allocation of resources to equip the agencies and to replenish climate funds.”

Landless Brazilians are invading more and more protected areas of the Amazon

Caroline Prolo, head of the environmental law practice at the Brazilian law firm Stocche Forbes, said that this was the first time the Supreme Court has been asked to address alleged violations of Brazil’s national climate change policy which incorporates its legally binding commitments to UN Climate Change (UNFCCC).

“If successful,” she said, “it will open an avenue for other claims of climate inaction by the federal government. If the Supreme Court recognizes that the UNFCCC´s principles are transposed and may give rise to concrete obligations under Brazilian domestic law, this could help building a legal argument around the existence of a fundamental human right for a stable climate system within Brazilian law, which could in turn make the basis for many other climate litigation cases in the country.”

The court case has been formally lodged by six opposition political parties, with the backing of 10 NGOs including Greenpeace, the Climate Observatory and the indigenous peoples’ organisation APIB. A decision on precautionary measures is expected in 2021, but the final ruling could take several years to emerge.

Environmentalists urge UN to condemn Brazil’s spying at climate talks

Climate litigation is becoming increasingly common across the world. The London-based Grantham Institute logs 412 climate lawsuits in its database, not including the US.

Norway’s Supreme Court is deliberating on calls for the Norwegian government to stop Arctic oil licenses under both the national constitution and the Paris Agreement. In April 2018, the Colombian Supreme Court ruled in favour of 25 young people and ordered the government to ensure the protection of the Amazon from deforestation to protect present and future generations.

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On 31 August 2018, then presidential candidate Jair Bolsonaro gave the sign. “Here in Rondônia we have 53 conservation areas and 25 indigenous territories. It’s crazy what is done in Brazil under the banner of the environment,” he said at a press conference in Porto Velho. “This has blocked the progress of those who want to invest in agribusiness and even in family farming. We’re going to find a way to turn this around.”

Encouraged by this and other Bolsonaro announcements, the invasions of protected areas began even before the results of the presidential election were known. Five days before the second round of the election, hundreds of families entered the national forest of Bom Futuro, in the Porto Velho municipality. The following January, with the new president already in place in Brasília, scores of men took over part of the Uru-Eu-Wau-Wau indigenous territory, in the municipality of Jorge Teixeira, Rondônia.

This movement has gained momentum over recent weeks. Another five state conservation units in Rondônia have been invaded: Guajará-Mirim Park, ecological station Samuel and the extractive reserves Rio Preto Jacundá, Aquariquara and Ipê.

Of these five areas, only Ipê has been vacated, after a court decision taken by request of the Rondônia state prosecutor’s office and the federal public prosecutor’s office in Rondônia, who are taking action to revert the other invasions.

Last week invaders camped outside the state government house in Porto Velho to demand the regularisation of plots of land in Guajará-Mirim park and its buffer zone. Monitoring provided by the national institute for space research (INPE) has shown 979 hectares of land have been illegally deforested over the last 12 months, this in an area in which the forest was practically intact.

In the Jacundá national forest, there is a threat posed by a landless encampment set up in August on one of the access roads, but no invasion has occurred as yet.

While invasions of indigenous lands and conservation areas in the Amazon region are taking place, the occupations of large agricultural estates have come to an end. There has not been a single case of this kind in Rondônia for at least four years, according to Brazil’s national institute for colonization and agrarian reform (INCRA). Under Bolsonaro, there were only five cases in 2019 and none this year.

The shift in focus also reflects a change in the main actors. In the place of social movements, such as the landless rural workers’ movement (MST) that campaigns against the invasion of conservation areas and indigenous lands, unknown and recently created associations have arrived. These associations, advised by lawyers and georeferencing firms, with the involvement of cattle ranchers in the region, supporters of Bolsonaro, enjoy the support of local right-wing politicians. 

They try to distance themselves from the traditional image of the landless rural workers, with their opposition to ranchers and by creating the image of “turmoil”. One of the supporters of these movements in Rondônia is federal deputy Coronel Chrisóstomo, an army reserve officer.

A religious realignment is also taking place. The Catholic Church, which has close ties to MST and has produced historic defenders of land reform in the Amazon region, such as bishop Pedro Casaldáliga and sister Dorothy Stang, has lost ground. Meanwhile, evangelical churches are often to be found in the newly invaded areas, despite the absence of a more active and formal involvement.

Besides Bolsonaro’s rhetoric against protected areas and the MST, another great incentive for the invasion of protected areas in Rondônia is the recent success of these efforts. In 2010, during the Lula administration, national forest Bom Futuro saw its area reduced by two thirds so as to legalise invasions that had taken place mainly in the government of his predecessor, Fernando Henrique Cardoso.

At the state level, the governor of Rondônia, military police colonel Marcos Rocha, presented a bill to the state assembly this year that aims to legalise the invasions of Jaci-Paraná, which would affect 146,000 hectares of land. Around 55% of the conservation unit has already been stripped of forest, according to INPE.

Built on land cleared by an older invasion, the Bom Futuro camp was taken down on 10 September 2019, in a military police operation, after a court order obtained by the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation (ICMBio), the administrative arm of the ministry of environment. Around 200 families were removed.

Some of the displaced families set up camp around an abandoned schoolhouse in the neighbouring village of Rio Pardo, in the hope of being allowed to settle. When Folha was there, in August, there were around 60 families.

Their living conditions are precarious. There are two toilets in the camp, which had been without water for five days. The children, who are not in school at the moment due to the Covid-19 outbreak, used to spend five hours on a bus to travel to and from school. 

The spokesman for the group is José Roberto de Jesus, 47, native of Bahia. He is one of the people who believed that the forest Bom Futuro would be given to landless workers – a term he avoids, using “farmers” instead. His family migrated to Rondônia in 1984, but none of them managed to acquire a piece of their own land. 

Jesus, who is a father of five, works in the cacao industry, the family’s original occupation in the region of Ariquemes. He has no formal schooling, but has worked as a miner, blacksmith and charcoal worker. He says the advance of soya plantations, cattle raising and fish farming has reduced the availability of jobs, since these are activities that provide little employment.

He was not one of the leaders of the invasion, who disappeared after the complaint lodged by the public prosecutor’s office. After the eviction, his calm and articulate speech helped him gain ascendancy in the group, where he was nicknamed Pastor.

Repeating the story told by others who participated in the invasion, Jesus says he was encouraged to enter Bom Futuro because of the support given by ranchers. “It has never been my habit to invade something that belongs to others, but a unique opportunity arose and took me to that land. The ranchers put us there, as they had been fighting with the government, who took their lands and turned them into a reserve. They preferred to lose their lands to landless workers than to the government.”

Questioned about the risk of the ranchers taking the lands back if they were regularised, he responds: “We had to pay a price. We had to risk it.”

“I am an evangelical. God doesn’t allow us to invade anything that belongs to someone else, but what if you’re on land belonging to the Union? Who is the Union? The Union is us – we are workers. We were living on what was rightly ours, by law. We hadn’t invaded anything belonging to anyone else.”

Jesus says he voted for Bolsonaro and that the conversion of the Flona into a settlement depends only on the government. “I don’t understand this business of the fauna [of] Bom Futuro, but we understand that it is good land. We trust in the government, and in his campaign he [Bolsonaro] said there were many reserves in Rondônia, but they were degraded.”

A few weeks after the interview, Bom Futuro was invaded once more, this time by a different group. The Rondônia military police have yet to launch another repossession operation. From the start of this year to August, over 575 hectares have been deforested, according to satellite monitoring done by the MapBiomas Alerta.

“Many families were looking for a camp to stay at, in the hope of later obtaining a plot of land through the land reform process. Today this perspective is no longer there,” says the coordinator of the NGO Land of Rights, Darci Frigo, former president of the national council for human rights.

“They will settle on the margins or in places where there are indigenous people, quilombolas [members of quilombos, settlements formed centuries ago by escaped slaves], and areas of permanent protection. The tendency is to generalise invasions. It’s not that the poor are enemies of the environment. It’s that the rich, by keeping the poor living in poverty, end up creating the conditions that lead to environmental degradation. Besides the land grabbers, you have poor people who were waiting for land reform.”

About Bolsonaro, he says this: “His rhetoric attacks indigenous people, quilombolas and landless workers. It demoralises these people in the eyes of public opinion and simultaneously signals an order to support the invasions of public lands.”

According to geographer Ricardo Gilson da Costa Silva, of the federal university of Rondônia, Rondônia is undergoing a process of “Mato Grosso-ization” with the advance of soya plantations, that suffocate small farms and put pressure on the large cattle raising operations to seek new areas. The result is further deforestation in the north of the state and the neighbouring south of the state of Amazonas, that is undergoing a process of “Rondônia-ization”.

“This means deforestation,” Silva says.

[IG: “Mato Grosso-ization”: I’m not quite sure of the exact meaning and context of this] 

He describes the recent invasions as “agro criminality.”

“It’s not a social movement. These are economic and political movements sponsored by cattle ranchers, businessmen and local politicians. They sponsor invasions of protected areas, taking along landless workers in need of land, so as to create a situation which cannot be reversed. That is what is happening in Jaci-Paraná, where the rubber tappers have been evicted and there are even airstrips now,” he said. 

“It is a political and territorial project of converting environmentally protected areas into pasture land, to later turn them over to the land market and leave them for cattle raising and grain farming. It is something that has been thought out,” he says.

In Rondônia, Bolsonaro won the second round of the election with 72% of the votes, the third largest percentage in the country, only behind the states of Acre and Santa Catarina. State governor Marcos Rocha, an ally of the federal government, did not respond to comment requests. ​

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Over 160 non-governmental organisations and opposition federal deputies and senators said the Brazilian government had “violate[d] delegates’ security and safety within UN premises” and compromised their privacy, freedom of thought and speech and immunity. If tolerated, this could set “a grisly precedent”, they warned.

Last month, the Estadao newspaper revealed that Brazil’s intelligence agency Abin sent four agents to the talks disguised as “analysts”. One analyst told the newspaper they were there to monitor criticism of the Bolsonaro administration’s policy of removing environmental protections from the Amazon rainforest.

Brazilian spies intimidated government’s own delegates at climate talks

Three Brazilian sources who were at the talks told Climate Home that the spies had intimidated Brazil’s own delegates, so that they were too scared to be seen talking to civil society. The letter says these delegates included federal scientists and members of parliament.

The letter also accuses the government of spying on civil society observers and indigenous peoples’ representatives. Sources at the talks told Climate Home that spies had taken notes in civil society meetings, which were open to the public.

After the spying was revealed, Brazilian General Augusto Heleno who oversees Abin, claimed the spy agency had a legal right to monitor COP climate talks. He said Abin’s agents were there to tackle “sordid and lying international campaigns” supported by “bad Brazilians, with the objective of harming Brazil”.

5- Deplorável a visão míope de alguns sobre Inteligência de Estado. Temas estratégicos devem ser acompanhados por servidores qualificados, sobretudo quando envolvem campanhas internacionais sórdidas e mentirosas, apoiadas por maus brasileiros, com objetivo de prejudicar o Brasil;

— General Heleno (@gen_heleno) October 16, 2020

Jair Bolsonaro and his government have repeatedly criticised, harassed and attempted to intimidate environmentalists and indigenous people. Before his election in 2018, Bolsonaro said he would “put an end to all activism in Brazil”.

Just before the Madrid talks in 2019, Brazilian police raided an NGO in the Amazon and arrested four volunteer firefighters, accusing them of starting fires – a charge there was no evidence for.

In September 2020, Heleno accused indigenous activist Sônia Guajajara of committing a “crime against our country” by accusing Bolsonaro of “environmental crimes” and encouraging a “worldwide boycott against Brazilian products”. Guajajara has urged the EU to boycott products like soya, beef and palm oil from areas where those products are driving deforestation.

Recently, Brazil’s environment minister Ricardo Salles has taken Climate Observatory director Marco Astrini to court in an attempt to force him to retract criticism of Salles. Astrini said Salles was proposing a “task force for environmental destruction” after Salles suggested the government should deregulate the Amazon while the media is distracted by the coronavirus crisis.

The Brazilian government has repeatedly tried to divert the blame for record-breaking fires in the Amazon rainforest and Pantanal wetlands away from its own policies and on to indigenous people and environmentalists. President Jair Bolsonaro has claimed that international criticism of its policies is driven by “shady interests” jealous of Brazil’s food exports.

Bolsonaro has downgraded the role of his Environment Ministry and sacked a space agency chief for providing data which showed that deforestation was increasing. He has been accused of sabotaging a fund designed to allow local authorities and companies to reduce emissions and adapt to the impacts of climate change.

The UK and US have previously sent spies to UN climate talks, to gather intelligence on other delegations. In 2014, the UN secretary general at the time Ban Ki-Moon said any breach of confidentiality should be investigated, adding: “All diplomatic information is inviolable”. However if such an investigation took place, the outcome was not publicised.

At the time of publication, UN Climate Change had not responded to a request for comment.

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Brazilian newspaper Estadao revealed this week that four Brazilian secret agents were part of the country’s delegation, in a sign of president Jair Bolsonaro’s hostility to activists and the climate agenda.

Three sources confirmed to Climate Home they had seen evidence of spy presence at the summit, which made Brazilian negotiators unusually wary of talking to campaigners. The sources asked not to be named, for fear of reprisals against them or their employers.

The Brazilian Intelligence Agency (Abin) agents presented themselves as “analysts”. Speaking anonymously, one agent told Estadao that the team’s goal was to pick up criticism of Brazil’s Amazon policy. Bolsonaro has sought to open the rainforest up to mining and ranching, removing environmental protections. The agent claimed environmentalists had not been registered although he said that their campaigns were a “cause for concern”.

Before Bolsonaro’s election, Brazil was in line to host the 2019 summit. He pulled out, citing budgetary constraints.

Cop25 president Carolina Schmidt blames big emitters for low-ambition climate talks

One Brazilian environmentalist who was in Madrid told Climate Home they were approached by a man who asked “are you [correct first name]?”. The environmentalist agreed and the man said he was from the Institutional Security Office (GSI), a presidential body linked to Abin. The conversation then ended.

The environmentalist told Climate Home this was “strange but not surprising” as they were expecting the government to make it “a hostile environment” for NGOs.  There was a rumour that the Brazilian civil society pavilion was bugged so some discussions were held outside of it as a precaution.

The source said that people they suspected were GSI/Abin agents were taking it in turns to sit in meetings and take notes. They said this intelligence-gathering was so obvious it was “funny”.

According to two other campaigners, government delegates were scared to be seen speaking to them, which had not been the case at any previous talks. They believed this was the first time Abin or the GSI had attended climate talks.

One climate campaigner said they had approached one of the negotiators, who they had known for a long time. “He never looked at me while he walked,” they said. “And all of a sudden, near the sofas between pavilions, he jumps aside and hides behind a pillar. ‘I have already told you I can’t be seen with you, goddammit!’ That was their level of stress.”

The other campaigner said government delegates were only able to offer a “very discreet hello” and to talk in the airport after the talks. The campaigner said: “I knew that if I was to try to speak to someone, this could harm their position. They could get fired if they were seen speaking to me… and I’m not exaggerating that [the Brazilian government is] so insane they could do this.”

Brazil’s military operations are not halting deforestation in the Amazon

Carlos Rittl was the executive director of a network of green NGOs called Observatório do Clima at the time of the Madrid talks. He said that there were rumours that Abin agents were present, but the activities of Brazilian civil society were all out in the open and on the record – so there was no intelligence to be gained from spying on them.

Rittl said that intimidating civil society may have been one of the agents’ goals. Before he was elected, Bolsonaro said he would “put an end to all activism in Brazil”. Just before the Madrid talks, Brazilian police raided an NGO in the Amazon and arrested four volunteer firefighters, accusing them of starting fires – a charge there was no evidence for.

“If their aim was [to intimidate civil society], they failed completely,” said Rittl. “The discussions and proposals for civil society attracted the attention of stakeholders from governments, from civil society worldwide, from multilateral financial institutions – and most of these events were packed.”

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented wetland fires

At the time of the talks, Abin was run by Alexandre Ramagem. He is a former police officer who got to know Bolsonaro while in charge of his campaign trail security. According to Reuters, Ramagem is a close friend of Bolsonaro’s sons.

Governments have sent spies to climate talks before. Wikileaks revealed the UK and US did so in 2009 and the UK did so in 2010. In these cases though, leaked documents suggest the spies’ goal was to spy on other governments and find out their negotiating positions rather than their own government delegates and civil society.

The UK and US intelligence agencies also took more care to hide their activities, which were only exposed through Wikileaks. After the talks, Abin said on their website they had attended and released their agents’ names after Estadao’s freedom of information request. They have previously revealed the names of US spies they were meeting with by publishing their names in routine government data.

Abin did not reply to a request for comment for this story.

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Fifty years later, Operation Green Brazil, led by Vice-President General Hamilton Mourão, has deployed hundreds of soldiers to try to contain deforestation and other environmental crimes enabled by the highway.

One stage where Bolsonaro’s militarised strategy against environmental crimes is playing out is Apuí, 450 kilometers south of Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state. With an area roughly the size of Croatia, the municipality was born from the Rio Juma Settlement Project, launched in the early 1980s and managed by the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform (INCRA).

But the aim of distributing around 7,500 plots of land for family farming has not been completed. Most of those who benefited from the distribution left, amid a process of concentration of land ownership, and today the local economy is based mainly on extensive cattle ranching, the primary vector of deforestation in the Amazon region.

PHOTO 

This process of conversion of forest into pasture has gained new momentum since 2019. Despite Operation Green Brazil, Apuí lost 23,186 hectares from January to August – 5.1% more than the total area cleared last year. The numbers come from the non-governmental initiative MapBiomas, which monitors land use in Brazil.

The military has been in Apuí twice this year operating under the guarantee of law and order powers. The focus of the first incursion, from 20 to 26 June, was fighting deforestation, with the participation of Ibama, the Brazilian Institute of the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources, since the military is unable to carry out procedures such as applying fines.

The second time the army went to Apuí, in August, it provided support to firefighting efforts undertaken mainly by the town’s firefighters, hired through an Ibama national programme for preventing forest fires, known as Prevfogo.

PHOTO 

Joint operations involving the armed forces, Ibama and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation ( ICMBio) are not a new feature of the Bolsonaro era. The difference is that, in the past, the military was limited to providing logistic support for operations such as camping, transportation of seized good and land, river and air travel.

And the presence of soldiers has a deterrent effect on criminals who almost always have firearms. This effect is temporary, however, lasting only during the operation.

Since the wave of forest fires last year, Bolsonaro has transferred the command of operations in the Amazon region to the military. Ibama inspectors accompany the soldiers to write up reports; they are consulted but do not have the power to make decisions on targets and strategies.

One of the main differences is that in the operations they take part in, the armed forces do not allow the destruction of equipment used by criminals in areas of cleared forest and artisanal mining operations, such as tractors and diggers. This is a tactic permitted by law.

Destruction of equipment is one of the main tools employed by Ibama and ICMBio in remote areas. For reasons of logistics and safety, it is almost impossible to transport the equipment to a town. Now, however, the delinquents recover their assets as soon as a military operation moves on from an area.

PHOTO

Another difference is the relationship with the press. Before Bolsonaro, Brazilian and foreign reporters used to accompany Ibama on operations in the Amazon area. The images of inspectors destroying equipment and arresting offenders in the jungle had an intimidating effect.

Now, however, Ibama and ICMBio employees have been forbidden to give interviews. General Mourão banned reporters in the operations of the second Green Brazil mission. Over the last few months, Folha made several requests to accompany the military, but all were refused.

Folha accompanied a team of inspectors from Ipaam, Amazonas state’s Environmental Protection Institute, a state government agency, for two days. The aim was to confirm on-site deforestation shown by satellites and book criminals caught breaking the law. Despite promises of army support, military police officers provided the protective escort.

On the first day, the team covered 100 km on the Trans-Amazonian Highway and then turned into a side road. After 15 km of dense forest, the convoy reached a recently cleared area, with newly planted grass coming up between burned-out tree trunks.

A little further ahead, there was an area of 30 recently cleared hectares. Large felled and burned trees were piled on one on top of the other.

PHOTOS 

The house that seemed to be the main one of the ranch was empty. A little further ahead, we saw a parked motorcycle with a machete sheath on the seat. The person there had hidden in the forest on hearing the trucks arriving, the officers suggested.

The second day followed a similar pattern: a bumpy dirt road and no arrests. But the recently cleared area was a lot bigger: 400 hectares.
Ipaam stated that on the days Folha accompanied their agents (August 24 and 25), the deforested areas identified came to 2,429 hectares. However, no environmental fine or embargo has been imposed so far because those responsible for the deforestation have not been identified.

The difficulties of fighting deforestation have led the environmental secretary of the state of Amazonas, Eduardo Taveira, to reduce the goals. In June, during the launch of Operation Curuquetê 2, he said the goal was a 15% reduction of the deforested area in Amazonas state from August 2020 to July 2021. Now he says that if deforestation does not continue growing that will already be an excellent result.

Taveira insists the state government’s scope of action is limited because 80% of all deforestation takes place in federal public lands. In these cases, Ipaam can only check if the activities undergone are subject to state environmental licensing.

Another difficulty is identifying those responsible. In the entire state of Amazonas, Taveira says that only 20 of the 58,000 self-declared rural environmental registries, known as Cadastros Ambientais Rurais (CAR), have been verified – no more than 0.03% of the total number. “How can we identify offenders when there is this accountability void? We must increase land regularisation efforts to resolve this situation,” he said.

Created in 2012, CAR is a mandatory electronic self-declared public registry for rural properties. In theory, it should include information such as the situation of permanent preservation areas and legal reserves of native vegetation created to control and fight deforestation. In practice, it has been used by land grabbers to try and legalise invaded and deforested public areas.

As part of the Green Brazil operation, Taveira says the Bolsonaro government remains close to the Military Command of the Amazon and that the state of Amazonas has been receiving logistic support. But he mentions an absence of coordination.

Speaking through its press office, the ministry of defence gave out mistaken dates on which Operation Green Brazil was supposed to have been deployed in Apuí and did not provide specific data on the results of the armed forces’ work in the municipality.

Operation Green Brazil 2 began on 11 May and is expected to conclude on 6 November, subject to extension. The cost of the armed forces resources and personnel deployed between 11 May and 10 June has been estimated at R$ 60 million ($10.8 million). For the following period, a monthly cost of R$ 70 million ($12.6 million) is estimated.

A recent study of 35 years of land policy in Apuí shows there was rapid deforestation taking place in the municipality already before Bolsonaro. From 2013 to 2018, deforestation in the area grew at twice the rate of the rest of the Amazon region.

Authored by researchers Gabriel Cardoso Carrero and Philip Fearnside, among others, the study was published in the Environmental Management journal. It points out that the growth of cattle ranching in Apuí shows the area is part of the market demand for beef. But it also highlights the actions of criminal groups that use deforestation and creation of pastureland to seize public lands illegally.

The study says it is necessary to identify who the land grabbers are, who funds the deforestation and identifying the different actors involved.

Cattle rancher Paulo Lopez has been in the region for 40 years and says the greatest deforesters come from outside Apuí. According to him, the land market has grown with the arrival of buyers from the state of Rondônia, where commercial farming is gaining ground over cattle raising.

PHOTO

Lopez believes the fight against deforestation requires the regularisation of land ownership, an unfulfilled promise made by successive federal governments. “I have been to many meetings in which it was said that land regularisation was going to take place. I don’t know if it hasn’t happened yet because the government is unwilling or because it’s incompetent.”

According to the environmental secretary of Apuí, Domingos Bonfim, only a tiny proportion of properties in the municipality are regularised. Even among people settled by Incra, the National Institute for Colonisation and Agrarian Reform, he says, not even 5% have the final title deed to their land. But for any progress to be possible, the environmental liabilities brought about by years of illegal deforestation need to be resolved.

“There is this paradox. There is no land ownership regularisation, which is needed to regularise environmental issues. And to move ahead with environmental regularisation, you need to regularise land tenure.”

This reporting is part of The Amazon under Bolsonaro, a collaboration between Folha De S.Paulo and Climate Home News. Translated from the Portuguese by Clara Allain. 

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Those expecting a repeat of President Xi Jinping’s surprise announcement last week that China was aiming to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060 were left disappointed.

Xi outlined no grand plan for reversing nature loss and environmental destruction when he addressed the high-level biodiversity event on Wednesday. 

“The goal is to seek a kind of modernisation that promotes harmonious coexistence of man and nature,” he told political leaders in a pre-recorded message, insisting that economic development could take place while preserving the environment.

“It falls to all of us to act together and turn the earth into a beautiful homeland,” he added, calling on countries to strike an agreement during major biodiversity talks in Kunming, provisionally scheduled for May 2021, when governments are due to agree on a new framework to halt the decline of biodiversity beyond 2020. 

The UN summit on biodiversity convened by UN secretary general António Guterres on the sidelines of the general assembly aimed to build political momentum and bolster financial commitments ahead of the talks in Kunming. 

The UN hoped the event would be a platform for countries to announce concrete action to stem the decline of the planet’s biodiversity. But beyond speeches, few leaders came with a plan.

UN summit highlights $700bn funding gap to restore nature

“If the summit is nothing but rhetoric, then we are repeating the mistakes made in Aichi,” Li Shuo, Beijing-based senior energy and climate officer at Greenpeace, told Climate Home. 

“The lack of substance can’t hide the fact that political will on global nature protection is low,” Li tweeted during the summit. 

On Monday, 64 political leaders and the European Union launched a “leader’s pledge for nature” with a 10-point plan to halt global biodiversity destruction.

The pledge has now been signed by more than 70 countries, but China is not one of them. Australia, Brazil, Russia and the US, whose governments all control vast swathes of land and oceans, have not signed up either. 

Campaigners say that without concrete commitments, next year’s talks will fall flat.

A UN report earlier this month concluded that the world has missed all 20 biodiversity targets for 2020 agreed in Aichi, Japan, in 2010. Funding shortfalls were highlighted as a significant barrier to meeting the targets and campaigners fear the failure could repeat itself if countries do not raise more funds ahead of the talks in Kunming.

UN agencies have warned that countries needed to commit an additional $700 billion per year to reverse the destruction of nature. But at a funding conference on Monday, only Germany made a firm commitment to increase its funding for protecting biodiversity in developing countries.

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

“China should provide stronger leadership in the current Kunming process. It is crystal clear that the negotiations are heading to an Aichi 2.0. If one looks at the Aichi round, it is essentially a rhetorical boom in 2010 followed by an implementation bust over the subsequent decade,” Li told CHN. 

Other major emitters have also been criticised for their lack of commitment.

The US did not even send a representative to the UN event. And Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro told the UN in a statement last week the country was already subject to “the best environmental legislation on the planet”. 

On Tuesday, Bolsonaro revoked regulations that protect tropical mangroves and other coastal ecosystems. 

“Their deliberate plans to actively destroy nature makes both the Trump and Bolsonaro administrations climate villains,” said Arlo Hemphill, oceans campaigner at Greenpeace US.

Australia was also noticeably absent from the UN biodiversity summit. A government spokesperson said Australia would not agree to environmental targets “unless we can tell the Australian people what they will cost to achieve and how we will achieve it”.

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Many activists held virtual protests, but in some of the hardest hit countries, such as the Philippines and Kenya, they took to the streets to demand climate action and justice from their governments.

The theme of this year’s global climate strike is supporting communities on the frontlines of the climate crisis.

Climate Home News spoke to three activists from the global south about their personal fears and the change they are fighting for.

Mitzi Tan, the Philippines 

Mitzi Tan says a new anti-terror law could endanger environmental defenders in the Philippines (Photo: 350org)

Two years ago, Mitzi Tan’s world view “shattered” when she first spoke to an indigenous leader from the Lumad tribe about how his people faced constant harassment, attacks and arrests in their fight to protect their land, rivers and forests from environmental destruction. 

“In the Philippines, we are already experiencing the worst impacts of the climate crisis. We have no choice but to defend the planet,” 22-year-old Tan told Climate Home News. 

Bolsonaro shifts blame for unprecedented Brazilian wetland fires

The Philippines is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, including rising sea levels, more intense typhoons and flooding.

“We would spend days in the dark with candles just listening to the battery powered radio for any updates on storms, always afraid that a tree would fall or that the flood would enter our house,” Tan said. 

On Friday, youth activists gathered in groups of ten to protest, bearing banners which read “protect climate protectors” and “there is no planet b”.

“Activists are being silenced here in the Philippines. I worry that people are starting to get desensitised to the number of deaths. We have names, we have lives, we are people, we’re not just statistics,” she said. 

The Philippines is the world’s deadliest country for environmental defenders, according to Global Witness. Last year 43 environmental defenders were killed and campaigners fear that a new anti-terror law could be used to validate their arrests and murders.

“A lot of people see this law as very dangerous. It could endanger all of us and our right to defend the planet,” said Tan.

The pandemic has fostered an even greater sense of solidarity among young people around the world, said Tan. “In a way the pandemic has brought everyone closer together.”

Kevin Mtai, Kenya

The climate crisis is constantly on 24-year-old Kevin Mtai’s mind. He is witnessing the impacts of climate change first-hand. 

“I personally have been affected mentally and physically… with floods destroying our home and crops and causing water-borne diseases like typhoid and cholera [among] my family,” Mtai told Climate Home.

He gathered with other climate activists in Nairobi on Friday to protest a controversial deal which would expand the plastics industry in Kenya.

#AfricaIsNotADumpster @KevinKevinmtai giving a talk at Uhuru Park, Nairobi about how plastic waste is a problem in Kenya.

We say no to dumping of plastics in Africa by the US @USEmbassyKenya #FightClimateInjustice #FridaysForFuture @Fridays4future @GretaThunberg @disharavii pic.twitter.com/qkdnVdgpgJ

— Oneup Action Kenya (@KenyaOneup) September 25, 2020

The oil industry is lobbying the US government to use a trade deal with Kenya as an opportunity to export more plastic to the country, a move which campaigners warn would turn Kenya into a dumping site for plastic waste. Kenya has the world’s toughest ban on plastic bags. Anyone caught producing, selling or carrying plastic bags faces up to four years imprisonment or fines of $40,000.

“We don’t want the government to sign that deal. They want to force us to take that plastic but our country is not the one using [it], the USA is. Africa is not a dump site. This is an injustice for us as Kenyans and for us as climate activists,” Mtai said. 

It is a global injustice that countries in the global south emit the least carbon dioxide in the world, but are the worst affected by climate change, Mtai said. 

“People in the global south do not have anything to protect their lives… they are facing water [shortages] and diseases,” he said. 

Marina Guia, Brazil 

Marina Guia and other Brazilian climate activists take part in a virtual strike on 25 September 2020 (Photo: Marina Guia)

16-year-old Marina Guia has become accustomed to thick smoke from wildfires enveloping her city, Volta Redonda, in Brazil.  “The city is dark because of the smoke. It is something that I see day-to-day,” Guia told Climate Home. 

“The indigenous people in the forests are the ones really suffering because of the fires. The fires attack the environmental defenders directly,” she said, adding that the pandemic has made it more difficult to protect indigenous communities. “We are trying to take care to not contaminate them.”

Together with other Brazilian activists, Guia has launched the SOS Amazonia campaign to support indigenous communities protecting the Amazon rainforest. 

“We are giving a voice to indigenous people. They are on the frontlines [of climate change] and are really in danger. They are attacked by Covid-19, deforestation and murders,” said Guia. 

In a message to the UN on Tuesday, Brazil’s president Jair Bolsonaro denied responsibility for the worst fires on record in the Pantanal, the world’s largest tropical wetland.

The fires have led to respiratory problems for people living in the region, exacerbating coronavirus outcomes. 

“The climate crisis will affect the poorest first and those that don’t have capacity to deal with it. Climate justice is something that the whole world will need to fight for. If we don’t have the environmental defenders, we don’t have the Amazon,” Guia said.

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