An area of the Amazon Rainforest after it was cleared by farmers in Itaituba, Para, Brazil, Sept. 26, 2019. Source: Reuters.com.
The Amazon Rainforest is one of the most important regions on the planet, home to one million indigenous people and three million species of plants and animals, and yet continuously faces the threat of severe deforestation. As the world’s largest rainforest and an extremely biodiverse region, the Amazon Rainforest contains a wealth of undiscovered species which could inspire crucial contributions to science and medicine, and its billions of trees help slow down the pace of global warming. Deforestation not only takes the benefits of the Amazon away, but also releases the carbon dioxide stored in trees into the atmosphere, accelerating global warming.
The past few years have seen some of the largest increases in deforestation of the Brazilian Amazon Rainforest. During 2020, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon reached a 12-year-high. From August 2019 to July 2020, 4,280 square kilometers of rainforest were destroyed, a 9.5 percent increase from the prior year. This rate of deforestation is almost three times higher than Brazil’s own stated goal in its 2010 National Policy on Climate Change, which projected 3,900 square kilometers of deforestation for 2020. This deforestation spike led Brazil to be the only country in the world to report a large increase in greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, a year when most countries’ emissions flatlined with the stalled global economy caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.
What caused this surge in deforestation? One primary cause is the weakened enforcement of legal environmental protections under far-right president Jair Bolsonaro, who has essentially turned a blind eye to illegal logging, farming, and mining—major drivers of deforestation. Bolsonaro’s efforts have caused the Brazilian government’s monitoring agency to issue fewer penalties in 2019 than it did in any of the previous 11 years and significantly decrease its inspection operations, allowing unsustainable and illegal industry to fester. Another driving factor is Bolsonaro’s continued effort to rollback conservationist legislation. Since Bolsonaro’s election in January 2019, the Brazilian government has consistently moved to repeal environmental policies. Bolsonaro has encouraged expansion of mining and farming, loosened controls on deforestation, and stopped demarcation of indigenous land, claiming it is the only way to lift the Amazon region of Brazil out of poverty. The Bolsonaro administration has sought to dismantle almost every environmental regulation and has even made efforts to prevent federal environmental agents from doing their jobs.
In order to save the Brazilian Amazon from continued destruction, environmentalists hope to spur the Brazilian government to take a strict stance against overdevelopment in the rainforest. They argue that there is a direct link between development and deforestation; it is no coincidence that Pará, the most deforested Brazilian state in the past two years, is also the state that has recently pushed to expand infrastructure projects such as roads and hydroelectric plants. Furthermore, Indigenous people have been killed for defending their territories from criminal infrastructure projects. The government has done nothing to stop this rampant over-development and deforestation but instead encourages it through their policies. The Bolsonaro administration has continuously supported environmental exploitation for the sake of economic growth, backing cattle farmers and land speculators as they clear vast tracts of the rainforest to profit.
The situation in Brazil illustrates how governments play a critical role in—and have a high responsibility for—climate change and environmental conservation. The preservation of the Amazon Rainforest is critical to mitigate global warming, to preserve plant and animal species, and to protect indigenous peoples. The current Brazilian government has reversed course from prior policies aimed at preserving the Amazon Rainforest, bringing the world closer to even greater environmental disaster.