The Brazilian government has announced a compromise proposal which it hopes will resolve the controversy over the country’s Forest Code, the law limiting clearance of native forests on private land.

NGOs have warned that reforms tabled by lawmakers sympathetic to the agricultural lobby would undermine Brazil’s climate policy by stimulating deforestation.

The environment minister Izabella Teixeira said the government had reached a consensual proposal that would refine the current system while avoiding environmental risks.

According to the environment ministry, the new proposal included the principle of allowing landowners to protect forest areas in other parts of the same biome, in compensation for converting more than the permitted proportion of the property itself.

Such compensation could occur in a different state so long as it was protecting a priority area for biodiversity conservation.

However, the govenment would not accept reforms that amounted to a blanket amnesty for landowners who had already deforested areas not permitted by the code, a key element of the original proposal promoted by the agrcultural lobby.

Teixeira said that if agreement could not be reached with the congressional leaders promoting the reform, the government’s proposals would be tabled in the form of amendments.

After the announcement, Brazilian media reported that talks had been held between leaders of the environmentalist and “ruralist” or pro-agriculture factions in Congress. Some progress was made the report said, but differences remained.

Friends of the Earth Brazil welcomed moved towards compromise on the issue.

“The points of difference can be easily resolved,” the group said in an editorial on its website. “It’s not necessary to have an unrestricted amnesty for those who deforested. Such an initiative would reward those who never obeyed the law, and would punish producers who act according to the law.”

The new legislation is expected to be voted in Congress in the first week of May.

NB A version of this article was published at www.pointcarbon.com

Ranchers in the Brazilian Amazon are threatening to poison jaguars and pumas attacking their livestock, after their habitat was destroyed by a nearby dam.

The farmers in Rondônia state say the big cats have invaded their properties since construction began on Jirau dam, one of two controversial hydro-electric projects recently approved on the Madeira River, a major Amazon tributary.

They believe the animals are fleeing the deforestation caused by the construction of the dam and preparations for flooding around 250 square km of forest upstream.

“I’ve lost ten sheep since November,” landowner Almino Brasil told the online newspaper Tudorondonia.

Another rancher, requesting anonymity, said, “It’s clear there was a huge mistake in the environmental handling of this dam. Before clearing the forest, they should have moved the jaguars to some wildlife reserve.

“But what did they do? Just put down their chainsaws in the habitat of these animals – they had no alternative except to seek refuge and food in the properties of the region.

“The fact is that before the dam, we did not have this problem around here.”

Wary of attracting attention by shooting the cats, a group of ranchers in the region is reported to be planning to exterminate the jaguars and pumas using poison.

Almino Brasil does not approve of the drastic solution being proposed by some fellow landowners, but he understands it.

“The jaguar is being molested in its own habitat and invading ranches and killing animals is just instinctive,” he says. “But the reaction of rural landowners is understandable, even if it is disproportionate. They are suffering damage and in some cases, they are having their livelihoods threatened by these creatures.”

The normally elusive jaguar, Panthera onca, is the largest member of the cat family in the Americas. Although it has a very wide range stretching from Mexico to Argentina, much of its habitat has been severely fragmented and the species is classified as Near-threatened. The Amazon is its last major stronghold.

The puma or cougar, Puma concolor, is found throughout the Americas and is not of conservation concern.

The Jirau and São Antonio dams on the Madeira River were approved by the Brazilian government amid huge controversy between 2007 and 2009. Brazil’s upstream neighbour, Bolivia, has expressed concern about possible impacts on the river and its resources. The dams are projected to  start generating electricity next year, but the project has suffered delays in approval for the transmission lines that will link the dams to Brazil's power grid.

The newspaper Valor Econômico reported this week that the cost of Jirau has soared from R$9bn (US$5.4bn) to R$13bn (US$7.8bn) since the construction was approved.

A version of this article was published at www.ouramazingplanet.com

Ask the average, well-informed punter to name the most significant current environmental threat to human societies, and she or he is very likely to answer climate change. Indeed, it is common for people to use climate change and the environment interchangeably.

As long ago as 2005, the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (MA) concluded that climate change was just one of five principal drivers behind threats to the benefits we derive from the planet’s ‘ecosystem services’. These services include fertile soils, purification of air and water and protection from disasters such as floods and storms.

While climate is projected to become an increasingly dominant driver, the degradation of ecosystems witnessed so far has largely resulted from the other drivers: loss and fragmentation of habitat, over-exploitation (especially over fishing), pollution and the introduction of invasive alien species.

The Third Global Biodiversity Outlook (GBO3), published last year, concluded that all of these drivers were either constant or increasing in intensity, resulting in the failure to meet the 2010 target of significantly slowing the loss of biodiversity. The consequences for human well-being were spelled out starkly in GBO3, especially the increased risk of passing numerous tipping points that would catastrophically reduce the capacity of ecosystems to meet human needs.

These include: the rapid drying of the Amazon rainforest, affecting rainfall across the croplands of South America and exacerbating global warming; the collapse of coral reefs, affecting the livelihoods of some half a billion people; and the ‘death’ of lakes due to the build up of nutrients such as phosphorous and nitrogen.

While this can sound like yet more doom and gloom, a more positive message lurks within GBO3 and other recent reports looking ‘beyond climate change’: some of the worst impacts of climate change do not seem so inevitable if we recognise the full range of pressures on ecosystems and take co-ordinated aggressive action to deal with all of them.

Protecting ecosystems will both keep more carbon out of the atmosphere –  mitigating the scale of climate change – and mean more diverse and resilient ecosystems will be better able to adapt and cope with the climate change it is already too late to prevent.

The most obvious example of the first benefit is the value of avoiding tropical deforestation, which is estimated to account for between 15% and 20% of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, many other types of ecosystem play essential roles in keeping carbon out of the atmosphere: for example, a report by the UN Environment Programme in 2009 estimated that coastal formations like mangroves, salt marshes and seagrass beds capture ‘blue carbon’ equivalent to nearly half the annual emissions from the global transport sector. Those formations are also critical as nursery grounds for many commercially-important fisheries: all are disappearing rapidly due to various forms of coastal development.

The need for a co-ordinated approach is even more persuasive when biodiversity is seen as a kind of insurance policy against climate change. Regardless of how aggressively we tackle emissions from fossil fuels, we are almost certainly committed to decades of warming from what we have already pumped into the atmosphere. So, do we need to be fatalistic about the impacts?

Perhaps not, if we recognise the importance of resilient ecosystems in the tough times ahead. Take coral reefs: we may be too late to avoid significant ‘bleaching’ from warmer sea temperatures and damage from ocean acidification, the result of higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. But if we can seriously ease off on the other pressures assailing the reefs – overfishing, pollution, sediment dumping from inland soil erosion and so on – we may give them a fighting chance of survival.

In the Amazon as well, climate change is just part of a perfect storm that may tip the system over the edge. According to a recent study for the World Bank, really serious efforts to reduce deforestation, restore areas that have been lost or degraded, and cut back drastically on the use of fire, might prevent the collapse of the world’s largest tropical forest system.

This pattern can be seen repeated in a range of systems across the planet, from desertification in the Sahel of África, to the destruction of coastal ecosystems from rising sea levels and storm damage. Addressing the multiple threats we face might just buy us the time before low-carbon solutions start to make a difference to the pace of climate change.

Biodiversity can also make human societies more resilient to climate change. The genetic diversity of both wild and domesticated plants, and indeed livestock, provides us with options to cope with things like drought and emerging diseases, that are closed off if we allow landscapes and agricultural systems to become ever more uniform and homogenised.

We need an approach to climate change that sees the wider picture rather than using the narrow, energy-focussed lens that can lead to distortions and perverse outcomes. One of the clearest examples has been the targets for boosting biofuel use that stimulate the clearing of Asian rainforests to grow oil palm monocultures. This is disastrous for biodiversity and is ultimately self-defeating for climate since emissions from loss of forests and peatlands can outweigh any benefits from lower oil use by vehicles.

The same may be true of some large dams built for renewable hydropower. Apart from further threatening freshwater biodiversity (declining faster than any other kind), they may end up as climate-unfriendly as fossil fuels due to emissions from methane and associated deforestation.

Is there a clear message for the public and policymakers here that can advance the debate without causing further confusion and helplessness?

Taking steps to safeguard biodiversity can often lead to results at the local level that that are much more tangible to people than ‘doing their bit’ to limit climate change. Restoring wildlife in a local pond, the return of wildflowers and butterflies in an urban park or meadow; these kinds of actions can lead to improvements in the quality of life that can be seen here and now, not through a promise and leap of imagination into the future.

The message is that conserving, sustainably using and restoring biodiversity is not just nice for its own sake, but is an essential investment in the natural infrastructure that will help to sustain resilient communities and livelihoods in coming decades. Engaging the public in this wider vision may help counteract the fatalism that can make the fight against  climate change seem just too hard and hopeless.

NB. This piece was published as a Comment on the website of the Royal Society of Arts (RSA)

Trying to keep up with the latest manoeuvrings over Brazil's forest policy is rather like following the country's famous "novelas" or soap operas. Except in this case, the plot is far more complicated and bizarre. So for the benefit of those who missed this week's episodes, here is a quick(ish) synopsis:

Brazil's government delegation at the climate talks in Cancún plays a constructive role in edging towards global agreement on long-term cuts in greenhouse gas emissions, flush with the news that Amazon deforestation has fallen to its lowest level since satellite monitoring began. Meanwhile, back in Brasilia, the leader of the governing Workers' Party in the chamber of deputies, Cândido Vaccarezza, is rumoured to have struck a deal with the Ruralistas (pro-agrobusiness lobby in Congress) that could set off a massive new wave of deforestation and jeopardise Brazil's voluntary but now domestically-binding commitment to cut greenhouse gases. He is allowing a vote (next Tuesday) on a so-called "regime of urgency" for legislation that would weaken Brazil's forest code - the rules that require landowners to keep a certain proportion of  their land in native vegetation and leave forest buffers along rivers etc. NGOs say he is allowing the changes to be fast-tracked in return for support from the Ruralistas for his bid to become house speaker when the new Congress convenes in the New Year - even though the president-elect Dilma Rousseff has pledged to veto any changes that amount to an amnesty for deforesters (which the legislation does, as currently drafted). In an interview with the magazine Época, Vaccarezza is a little less than enlightening:

Época: Did you do this against the will of the government?
Vaccarezza: I did it to avoid the bill itself being voted on this year.
Época: You mean the new [forest] code will only be voted on at the beginning of next year?
Vaccarezza: No, no. Not to be voted the beginning of next year. That's another issue. The deal I made was to vote on the urgency of the bill. Not to vote on the bill this year.
Época: That's what I asked. You will vote on the urgency of the bill and promise not to vote on the Code proposed by deputy Aldo Rebelo [the communist deputy proposing the weakening of the forest protection rules] this year....
Vaccarezze: Vote on the urgency of the bill, but not vote on the bill.
Época: And when will the bill be voted?
Vaccarezza: We have no agreement about when the bill will be voted.
Época: If it's on a regime of urgency, it will be voted at the beginning of next year?
Vaccarezza: No, no. There are bills on a regime of urgency for five years without being voted on.

Roll the credits? Not quite yet. Meanwhile back in Cancún,  Kátia Abreu, president of Brazil's National Agricutural Confederation (CNA) and also senator for the state of Tocantins - location of some of the biggest agricultural expansion into the Cerrado savanna - is speaking at the launch of a new programme of research into sustainable farming for each of Brazil's six biomes. She attacks as "useless" the so-called "legal reserve", the cornerstone of the Forest Code which requires landowners to keep at least 20% of their property (80% in the Amazon) as forest, claiming that there should be a clear separartion of land protected for nature and that used for agricultural production. "If I put a foreign body in a unit of economic production, it will muck up the works," she says. In recognition of her support of Brazil's big-farm interests, Sen. Abreu receives the Greenpeace "Golden Chainsaw" award as she walks through the conference centre in Cancún (see photo) - an honour previously given to Blairo Maggi, former governor of the state of Mato Grosso and big-time soya farmer, now also a senator.

To be continued ....

From tomorrow (Saturday 11th Dec) until Wednesday I will be attending a scientific conference in the town of Bragança Paulista,  organised by FAPESP, the public body that funds scientific research in the state of São Paulo - which contributes about half of all the published scientific papers in Brazil. The theme is "Getting post-2010 Biodiversity Targets Right", and it will bring together experts from around the world to discuss how the strategy for reducing biodiversity loss, agreed at October's UN summit in Japan, can benefit from the latest science and use robust data about the state of life on Earth.

I will be tweeting and blogging from the conference itself, but first here is a preview I did which grabbed the top slot on this week's Science in Action programme, on BBC World Service Radio. It focuses on one of themes of the conference, "Metagenomics as a tool to assess micro-biodiversity". Meta-what? you may well ask, as I did when I read this bit of the programme. But fighting the temptation to allow my eyes to glaze over and move on to some easier concepts, I persevered with some of the abstracts in this section, and realised it was a fascinating field: the use of DNA decoding techniques to analyse the extraordinarily complex communities of micro-organisms that occur in nature - in soils, oceans, plants, etc. Because most of these microbes will not reproduce outside the environment where they have evolved, the standard techniques of culturing bacteria etc in the lab do not work - so the communities are studied as a whole, with samples brought back from the environment and mashed into a kind of soup from which "total DNA" is extracted and identified.

Looking for the fieldwork within easiest reach of my current base in coastal São Paulo state, I was fortunate to come across the work of Professor Márcio Lambais, at the Department of Soil Sciences in the University of São Paulo, based at the ESALQ campus in the city of Piracicaba. His team has been looking at the communities of bacteria that occur in a number of tree species in the Atlantic Forest, one of the most diverse ecosystems on Earth. Lambais has found that the leaves, bark and roots each have distinct, amazingly diverse communities of bacteria that are unique to that species. Not only that - when they took samples from the same species a long distance apart, the bacterial communities changed again. So if a tree species is lost from a particular region, literally thousands of bacteria species go with it. So what? Well, I discuss some of the implications in the BBC report, and for those wanting a more in-depth discussion of the research I am posting here a full version of the interview I did with Márcio Lambais in a small forest adjoining his campus in Piracicaba.

Today's announcement of the lowest level of Brazilian Amazon deforestation since the start of satellite monitoring in 1988 deserves to be celebrated, and it has been by out-going President Lula and his ministers - with perfect timing for them as they start negotiations at the Cancun climate talks where reduced deforestation is a major issue.

So the rest of this blog is going to seem very churlish as I add some context which takes a little bit of the shine off that main headline.

The first point to make is that the figure - 6,450 square kilometres of forest clear-cut in the year up to August 1st 2010 - is considerably higher than many of the predictions, which had forecast a fall to around 5,000 square kilometres based on the preliminary month-by-month monitoring. It is a cut of around 14% on the figure for the previous year (7,500 sq km) and still means an area larger than the state of Connecticut was cleared in 2009-10.

Even so, when you consider that an area of the Amazon more than four times that size went under the chainsaw and the torch in 2003-4, the scale of the progress must be acknowledged.

One reason for caution was highlighted by the director of the Brazilian National Space Research Agency (INPE), Gilberto Camara, as he delivered the presentation at the press conference to launch the monitoring results in Brasilia, with President Lula himself in attendance.

He helpfully emphasized the point on Twitter (@gcamara), advising his followers to check out the slide reproduced below.

To translate the text for non-Portuguese speakers, the heading reads "Deforestation by size" and the bottom notes, "Cutting less than 50 hectares: 35% of the total in 2002, 80% of the total in 2010.

In other words, there has been a very significant change in the pattern of deforestation since that high point in 2003-4: the very large mass-clearances, for example by soya farmers and big-time cattle ranchers, have to a large extent been brought under control, so what remains is a  large number of smaller acts of deforestation.

You could say that is good news, reflecting the pressure imposed on the big-time deforesters by Brazilian government action, international consumer pressure and indeed the policies of Brazilian stores including Walmart refusing to source beef from ranches associated with deforestation.

Even so, as Camara notes, it makes the continued decline of deforestation that much more challenging to achieve: how to monitor and control the remaining destruction when it is so dispersed?

"“After a fall of 45 per cent in deforestation in 2009, we had another 14 per cent in 2010. Each year, reducing deforestation will become more difficult,” Camara said on Twitter.

Another, linked trend is confirmed in these figures - a shift of focus away from the so-called "arc of deforestation", that swathe of land to the South and East of the Amazon biome which has seen the main advance of the agricultural frontier in recent decades.

As the two charts above show, the states in which that frontier is concentrated, Mato Grosso, Pará and Rondônia, have all seen declining trends in deforestation which have continued this year. States such as Amazonas and Acre, on the other hand, where a vast majority of the forest area is so far still intact, saw increases in deforestation this year, albeit still at a relatively low level. It is a warning sign that new frontiers may be opening up, and these trends could be very challenging to control.

I could go on to catalogue some of the remaining concerns: the possible impact of loosening Brazil's Forest Code, which could be voted imminently in the Congress (see last but one post); the impact of current projects to improve highways and build dams; the renewed pressure from a reviving world economy and additional demand for the agricultural commodities driving deforestation; and the likelihood of displacing deforestation to other regions, in particular the ultra-diverse Cerrado savanna which is disappearing at more than twice the current rate of the Amazon.

But who am I to be the Cassandra on the day Greenpeace Brasil issued a release headlined "Another nail in the coffin of deforestation"? It referred not to the INPE figures, but to an announcement by Banco do Brasil that it would deny credit to soya formers who planted in recently-deforested areas.

So for now, Brazil is well on track to meet its pledge to reduce Amazon deforestation by 80% before 2020. The world will be watching and hoping this trend continues.

I have departed from my usual fare of green issues to write about a remarkable phenomenon arising from the current violence in Rio. A version of this article is published on the BBC News website.


For the past few days, the Brazilian public has watched transfixed as scenes more reminiscent of Iraq or Afghanistan than of their own “marvellous city”, Rio de Janeiro, unfolded live on TV screens.

 

Smoke rising from burning buses, armoured vehicles moving into the sprawling favelas or shanty-towns, heavily-armed drug traffickers fleeing across wooded hillsides to escape the advancing forces – all were beamed directly from helicopters into living rooms across Brazil.

 

In the studios, a succession of security experts, sociologists, lawyers and anthropologists have helped presenters fill the time and interpret what was going on in the “morros” or hills, as the steeply-sloping favelas are known.

 

The voices of the people living inside the favelas themselves have been largely absent from most of the mainstream coverage.

 

 Viewers could only wonder what it was like for residents of the notorious Complexo do Alemão, or German’s Complex, hidden from the view of the flak-jacketed reporters crouching in front of the armoured military vehicles poised at the entrance to the final redoubt of the drug traffickers.

 

Users of Twitter, however, did not have to wonder.

 

A remarkable, improvised real-time news service was being beamed out of the favela, and gathered followers exponentially in a classic “viral” explosion of interest.

 

The user @vozdacomunidade, or Voice of the Community, started sending tweets out at lunchtime on Saturday describing minute-by-minute the bursts of gunfire, sounds of explosions and helicopters flying overhead. By Sunday evening it had attracted more than 20,000 followers.


 

What makes this community micro-blog all the more extraordinary is that none of its “reporters” is over the age of 17.

 

At its heart is an aspiring journalism student called René Silva, co-ordinating the operation from a PC in his grandmother’s house in the Morro de Adeus (Farewell Hill) within the Complexo do Alemão, helped by a small network of teenage “correspondents” based at strategic points around the favela, each tweeting independently.

 

At 17 years of age, René is no novice when it comes to community journalism. Ironically, this weekend was to have seen the fifth birthday party of a monthly newspaper, also called Voz da Comunidade, which he founded at the tender age of 11. The party was postponed.

 

Acting as reporter, photographer, printer and advertising sales manager, René has used the paper to highlight the issues facing residents of the troubled favela, and it soon became a focal point for the community. Local businesses supported the newspaper with advertising, and it attracted sponsorship from one of the Brazilian mobile phone operators.

 

Voz da Comunidade currently has a print run of around 5,000.

 

As it became clear his community was the centre of national and international attention with drug traffickers fleeing from neighbouring favelas to hide in its sprawling alleys, René started tweeting. It did not take long for the Brazilian “twittersphere” to take notice.

 

“Intense gunfire now in Complexo”, “Machine guns and blasts all around”, “People hanging out white cloths calling for peace” – these were the kind of eye-witness reports unavailable to the main broadcasters reliant on distant camera shots the briefings from police spokespeople.

 

While the tweets reflected the fear and tension, there was humour mixed in. “The pizza shop is closed! Saturday night isn’t Saturday night without pizza!”

 

At some points during the drama, René even rigged up a live video stream from the roof of the house using a mobile phone, showing the helicopters buzzing overhead and giving a sense of the terror of the besieged community.

 

The intensity and immediacy of the reporting soon attracted the attention of some of Brazil’s best-known journalists who “retweeted” from their own sites and helped René pile on the followers. By Sunday, after a night of little sleep interrupted by the constant crackling of gunfire, René was becoming a national celebrity and was interviewed live on mass-audience TV shows.

 

The tone of responses to René’s tweets showed that the massive interest was  based on much more than curiosity about the events he was reporting.

 

The Brazilian public, notoriously divided on social issues, seemed uniformly moved in admiration of these young reporters showing such initiative, bravery and professionalism in the most adverse circumstances.

 

They defied the stereotype view held by many middle-class Brazilians about favela-dwellers, and René found himself bombarded with complimentary tweets praising his courage, pleading with him to be careful and even saying he was starting a revolution in journalism.

 

Whatever the truth of that, Brazil is certainly at the forefront of the social networking revolution. That was evident from a scan of the “trending” topics registered by Twitter in recent days.

 

For most of the period, at least half of the top ten “hashtags” trending worldwide related to the police operations in Rio – tags like #paznorio (peace in Rio) and #bope (initials of the elite police unit involved in the operation) showed that the Brazilian conversation was being held at an intensity and volume high enough to dominate global Twitter traffic.

 

A survey in October by the comScore digital research company showed that Brazil had the world’s highest rate of Twitter use , accounting for 23 per cent of internet users compared with just 12 per cent in the United States. Google’s Orkut is still the most popular social networking site in Brazil, with 36 million users, but with both Facebook and Twitter, each with some 9 million users, climbing up fast behind it.

 

Social media generally in Brazil account for some 20 per cent of time people spend online, making it one of the most popular online activities. Various explanations have been put forward – one being that the relatively restricted ownership and variety of traditional media leave Brazilians open to the new networks of information-sharing.

 

Another is that Brazilians are intensely social people, so these forms of interaction fit perfectly with the clubbable exuberance of the national character.

 

Whatever the explanation, social networking has thrust 17-year-old René Silva into the national limelight in a way that would have been unthinkable just a few months ago. For many he has become a symbol of hope for what might emerge out of the smoke of the battles with the drug gangs.

 

At one point in the intense Twitter conversation of the past hours René explained he was hoping to train as a journalist at university. The reply came back, “You already are one, my dear.”

 

 

Below: News report from April 2010 (in Portuguese) profiling Rene's work as a community journalist in a Rio favela.

Brazil’s target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions would be jeopardized by current proposals in Congress to relax the country’s forest protection laws, environmental groups say.

 

The lower house of deputies may vote shortly on changes to the 45-year old Forest Code, which stipulates the areas of private property required to be kept in native vegetation.

 

The supporters of the revised code are pressing for it to be passed before newly-elected members of Congress take their seats in the new year.

 

However, Brazil’s environment minister called today for the vote to be delayed.

 

The Climate Observatory, a coalition of 35 NGOs including WWF-Brazil, Friends of the Earth and Conservation International, claims that some seven billion tonnes of carbon locked up in vegetation could be released as a result of the changes.

 

According to preliminary data from a study released in Brasilia on Tuesday, this would represent emissions of more than 25 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent, or 13 times Brazil’s emissions for 2007.

 

The study author André Ferretti said, “If the text is approved, Brazil’s target to reduce greenhouse gas emissions [by between 36.1% and 38.9% below projected 2020 levels] would be turned to dust – apart from countless impacts on biodiversity.”

 

The Forest Code was introduced in 1965 as part of a policy to protect Brazil’s forestry resources and prevent erosion. It stipulates a proportion of a private land holding known as the Legal Reserve, that needs to be kept free from production.

 

The proportion is 80% in the Amazon, 35% in the area of transition between the Amazon and the Cerrado savanna, and 20% in the remainder of the country.

 

In addition, cultivation is prohibited on parts of a property along riverbanks, on steep slopes, the tops of hills and close to springs, known as Areas of Permanent Preservation.

 

The laws have been widely flouted, and from next June, rules will come into force that would force landowners to restore forests on areas illegally cleared under the Code, or face large fines.

 

 

This has prompted the attempts by the strong rural lobby in Brazil’s Congress to relax the code, which they say makes agricultural production unviable in many regions if strictly applied.

 

According to the Climate Observatory study, the biggest impact of the proposed changes would be the exemption of smaller properties (up to about 400 hectares) from the requirement to maintain the Legal Reserve.

 

It says this would leave nearly 70 million hectares of forest, an area larger than Afghanistan, without legal protection.

 

An additional 1.8 million hectares of forest would be threatened by the proposal to halve the current buffer of 30 metres required to be left along the banks of rivers up to 5 metres wide.

 

In comments unconnected with the study, the Brazilian environment minister Izabella Teixeira said debate on the proposed changes should be widened before they are put to the vote.

 

Reported by the government news agency Agência Brasil, Ms Teixeira said that as currently drafted, the changes could attract a presidential veto.

 

“We are in favour of modernising the Forest Code, but we need to improve the debate, taking regional differences into account.”

 

Ms Teixeira said there was a “political elite” associated with agro-industry that did not want the debate on the proposal to be widened, but she also criticised what she called extremism among environmentalists that prejudiced debate on the issue.

Later, the chairman of the agricultural grouping in Congress, deputy Moreira Mendes from the Amazonian state of Rondônia, attacked the minister's intervention and said he would still be pressing for the reforms to be voted on before the New Year.


NB. A version of this article is published at www.pointcarbon.com


 

 

As the Brazilian president-elect Dilma Rousseff prepares to take up the reins of power in January, the news from the Amazon rainforest appears, on the face of it, to be pretty good.

All the signs are that the official deforestation figures for 2009-10, due out in the next few weeks, will for the second year running be the lowest since satellite monitoring began in the late 1980s.

A combination of stricter government enforcement, fussier buying policies from supermarkets and global agricultural companies, and the dampening of demand due to the recession drove clearance of the forest down to just above 7,000 square kilometres in 2008-9, barely one-quarter of the rate witnessed in 2003-4. The Brazilian national space agency is still analysing the high-resolution images comparing Amazon forest cover in August this year with the same time 12 months earlier, but coarser-resolution surveys suggest a further drop to somewhere in the ball park of 6,000 sq km of loss. Which would put the Brazilian government well ahead of schedule in its ambition to cut deforestation by 80% before 2020 - the cornerstone of its voluntary pledge to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

However, a new report by Paulo Barreto, senior researcher from the respected Belém-based NGO Imazon (Amazon Institute for People and and the Environment) sounds a note of caution. In a typically measured and well-balanced analysis, Barreto argues that yes, we may well be on course for a sustained reduction in the rate of loss of the world's greatest tropical forest. On the other hand, political and economic factors very much in play right now could easily break the trend and cause the reduction either to stall or move into reverse.

Barreto outlines three scenarios which helpfully summarise the variables. First, low deforestation  with  annual losses in the Amazon of less than 2,000 sq km per year; second, medium deforestation with losses roughly at or slightly higher than the rates of recent years; and finally, high deforestation, in which destruction of the rainforest would return to the past levels that caused such international alarm.

For low deforestation to be achieved and sustained, Barreto signals the following prerequisites:

• The Brazilian Congress would NOT change Brazil's environmental laws in ways that could promote deforestation by, for example, granting amnesties to environmental lawbreakers and reducing the proportion of land required to be kept in native vegetation. This, as I noted in my blog earlier this year, is very much on the agenda with the powerful rural lobby in Congress proposing major changes to the 1965 Forest Code - some deputies want the changes to be put to a final vote before the newly-elected members of the Lower House take their seats in the New Year. The strong showing of Green Party candidate Marina Silva in the first round of the presidential election may be relevant here, as Ms Rousseff subsequently pledged to veto any proposal that included such an amnesty.
• The government would continue the effective enforcement of environmental laws that have helped reduce the deforestation rate, and, crucially, crack down on illegal cattle abattoirs. This is critical for maintaining a trend that has created one of the most hopeful routes to a "virtuous circle" out of deforestation. Under pressure from NGO campaigns, federal prosecutors and, increasingly, from Brazil's big supermarkets, some major slaughterhouses are introducing systems to ensure they only buy from ranches able to demonstrate they are not grazing their cattle on recently-deforested land. However, since it is reckoned that around a third of Brazilian beef was produced in clandestine abattoirs in 2006, there is clearly a big loophole that needs to be closed.
• The government would reduce the transaction costs for obtaining environmental permits, speed up the titling of land and provide financial support, particularly for smaller farmers, to help observe environmental regulations and engage in forest management. This is especially important as the lobbyists against the current laws always cite their damaging impact on the incomes of smallholder farmers - Barreto suggests that this support could be financed as part of the government's climate change policy. In this scenario, better prices could be negotiated for beef certified as coming from ranches free of new deforestation, and there would be incentives to invest in greater productivity contributing to further economic growth without a return to forest clearances.

In the medium deforestation scenario,

• There would still be no major changes to the Forest Code and the government would continue to bear down on deforestation through the kind of enforcement measures adopted so far, especially targeting larger landholders.
  
• There would not be any additional incentives or support for complying with environmental laws, of the kind outlined above.
• New areas would become available for legal deforestation, through the greater accessibility created by current projects to pave highways in the Amazon, and through a number of current legislative proposals to reduce, downgrade or even abolish a significant number of protected areas - as revealed by an earlier Imazon report.
• The newly-available areas would provide legal beef supplies for markets unwilling to adopt a "zero deforestation" buying policy (for example, exports to China), and the clandestine beef producers would not be controlled.

The high deforestation scenario would include all of the conditions outlined under the previous scenario, but with the addition of Congress going through with the proposed changes to environmental legislation, and the president NOT vetoing them.

What Barreto's report shows is that the continuation of current positive trends on Amazon deforestation cannot be taken for granted. Plans already in the pipeline, or being pushed by very powerful political and economic interests, could yet derail the spectacular success of recent years in slowing the destruction of this incredible ecosystem. Additional and ambitious new initiatives will be needed to keep up the momentum. The good news is, it seems there is still all to play for.

             Dead manatee carried to a research station by "environmental agents" from local communities.                                                                                                                Photo: Instituto de Proteção Ambiental do Amazonas

The record-breaking drought in the Amazon basin has led to "uncontrolled" hunting of one of the world's most bizarre and gentle aquatic mammals, the threatened Amazonian Manatee (Trichechus inunguis), according to Brazilian environmental police.

They estimate that at least 300 manatees have been killed by hunters since September, when the Amazon and its tributaries began falling to their lowest levels since records began at the beginning of the last century.

The slow-moving herbivores, which can reach 3m in length and weigh some 450kg, become vulnerable to hunters as they take refuge in shallow lakes isolated by the retreating rivers. To make matters worse, the inability of police boats to navigate effectively in the parched channels of the basin allows the hunting to continue unchecked.

Manatees also known as sea cows, or "ox-fish" (peixe boi) in Portuguese, belong to the Sirenian order of sea mammals, so-called because of the somewhat unlikely legend that they were mistaken for mermaids by lonely sailors. They in turn belong to a wider group that also includes elephants and hyraxes.

The Amazonian species of manatee is considered Vulnerable in the IUCN Red List - which means it is on the first rung of the extinction threat ladder. It has suffered from widespread hunting, which has a particularly serious impact on numbers because of the species' low rate of reproduction.

So these current reports of literally hundreds of manatees being taken in a short period are very worrying for wildlife researchers.

The estimated numbers were reported in the online version of the Folha de São Paulo newspaper. They are based on reports to the state police, from informants known as "environmental agents", volunteers from traditional fishing communities who act as the eyes and ears of the state enforcement authorities in these very remote regions.

The commander of the environmental battalion of the Amazonas military police, Major Miguel Mouzinho Marinho, is quoted by Folha as saying that while patrols have been despatched to some areas where the illegal hunting has been reported, other locations are simply unreachable in present conditions. "Unfortunately we have lost control of the situation," he says. "Nature took years to recuperate the species, and now we have this killing."

The National Amazon Research Institute (INPA), based in the state capital Manaus, has been caring for an orphan female manatee calf, rescued from a lake after her mother had been killed by hunters. The institute estimates that in just one "sustainable development reserve", 400km from Manaus, at least 200 manatees have been killed.

"That means there are 30 tonnes of meat on the market," says researcher Anselmo d'Affonseca. "That's a matter for the police."