Amazon Rainforest: Amazon: Environmental Agenda with Blind Spots

Shortly before Carnival, the Brazilian government presented its “overarching environmental agenda,” which will apply up to and including 2027. But this is not enough to prevent further homemade rainforest destruction and the resulting climate damage.

“The scope of the overarching environmental agenda reflects the urgency and complexity of environmental and climate problems,” says the government document. In order to contain irreversible damage to ecosystems and people in a timely manner, it is not only necessary that the most diverse sectors actually integrate ecological sustainability into their processes and public policies, but also that the efforts are coordinated and integrated.

Despite these good-sounding introductory words and its 123 pages, the agenda does not address the key causes of rainforest destruction. Above all, scientists such as climate and Amazon researcher Philip Martin Fearnside criticize the continued intention to build dams to generate electricity and build overland roads in the Amazon. The agenda misses the opportunity to ensure that effective measures to prevent environmental disasters are implemented by the federal states, writes the senior scientist from the National Amazon Research Institute INPA on the Amazonia Real portal. “The document completely lacks plans to address the root causes of deforestation, such as building roads in the Amazon that will open up vast new areas of rainforest to encroaching loggers,” Fearnside said.

Gateway for lumberjacks

The federal highway BR-319 and the associated secondary roads, which have been controversial for years, are the best example of this. At the beginning of the 1970s, Brazil’s military dictatorship had already built the BR-319 through the rainforest parallel to the Purus and Madeira rivers, but gave it up again in 1988 due to lack of economic viability. Since 2015, thanks to a government “maintenance program,” it has been partially accessible again during the dry season. If fully restored and paved as required by today’s Department of Transportation and governors, the BR-319 and its proposed secondary roads would connect the infamous “arc of deforestation” of the already heavily deforested southern Amazon with Manaus, in the heart of the world’s largest rainforest. Actors of forest destruction such as land speculators, logging companies, cattle ranchers and industrial agriculture could advance along the asphalted route.

This would threaten the preservation of the last large intact block of forest in the Brazilian Amazon basin. In addition, the federal highway with its planned branch, the AM-366 state highway, will enable the realization of gas and oil exploitation in the Solimões basin, west of Manaus.

But the intact rainforest in the area called the Trans-Purus region is crucial to maintaining the water supply of Brazil’s largest city, São Paulo, and agriculture in the state of the same name. The south of Brazil is dependent on the immense masses of water that are transported by the wind over thousands of kilometers from the trees in the central Amazon region and by means of the so-called flying rivers. Without intact forests in central Amazonia, however, large parts of Brazil would be left high and dry.

Brazil would harm itself

Deforestation in the Trans-Purus region would also release vast reserves of carbon from the area’s biomass and soils, further fueling global warming and fatally counteracting any well-intentioned government climate action. Fearnside’s conclusion: Brazil itself would be one of the biggest victims of an asphalted BR-319.

Last year, however, 15 representatives of the states of Amazonas and Rondônia in Brasilia launched a legislative project (PL 4994/2023) that made the BR-319 from Manaus to Porto Velho in Rondônia “indispensable” for the infrastructure and national security of the country country and classifies it as a priority project in any national development or economic acceleration plans. And even the Amazon fund, which was actually founded to protect the rainforest and is equipped with money from Germany, among other things, should help finance the asphalting.