Brazilian Amazon: The challenges to overcome by Lula so as to protect it

Regain Brazil’s leading role in the fight against climate change, zero deforestation in the Amazon, combating mining, logging and other illegal activities and in the defense of indigenous peoples.

Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva wants to mark a new era in Brazil’s relationship with the health of the planet, despite the legacy left by Jair Bolsonaro, who for many turned the megadiverse giant into an environmental pariah.

And for this, Lula has started with very symbolic gestures: he has chosen the UN Conference on Climate Change 2022 (COP27) – which brings together representatives of almost 200 countries in Sharm el Sheikh, Egypt – to send a message of change, to try to resume stalled trade agreements and get more international support.

One of the first things that Bolsonaro did during the period of transition so as to begin his government in 2018 was to withdraw Brazil’s candidacy to host the COP25 in 2019. The press already ensures that Lula will monopolize all the spotlights – leaving the Bolsonaro team in the shadows – and that he will take advantage of the event to propose that the next conference be held in the Latin American giant.

He is also expected to announce in the summit the name of his head of Environment, a strategic portfolio that often collides with the interests of Brazil’s booming agribusiness, one of the world’s largest food exporters.

«Brazil is ready to resume its leading role in the fight against the climate crisis», asserted Lula in his first speech after winning the elections.

The future president has already said that one of his first government acts will be to revoke decisions that are harmful to the environment that Bolsonaro was able to apply without going through the National Congress. The measures that he will overthrow, will be known in the transition between both governments, which officially began its work this Monday.

Lula has also promised to create an exclusive ministry for indigenous affairs, whose peoples are scattered throughout the Amazon and are considered the best guardians of the environment.

A relief for the Amazon

The electoral victory of the patriarch of the left was received among environmentalists, inside and outside Brazil, with great relief after the mandate of the far-right ex-captain, a skeptic of global warming, In Bolsonaro’s first three years, deforestation advanced by 73% as a result – according to the analysts – of his speech in favor of the commercial exploitation of protected areas, which generated a feeling of impunity among environmental criminals, and of the cuts in the resources for the monitoring bodies.

Following Lula’s victory, countries like Norway and Germany quickly announced last week their desire to unlock funds for the preservation of the Amazon. In 2019, these two countries – which have contributed more than 500 million dollars – froze nearly 35 million euros due to Bolsonaro’s refusal to stop deforestation.

In Egypt, where he will travel on the 14th of November after being personally invited by the Egyptian president, Abdel Fatah al Sisi, Lula could meet with the US president, Joe Biden, with the UN secretary general, António Guterres, or with the French President Emmanuel Macron.

The possible meeting with Macron is also very symbolic. The French president, whose country, with French Guiana, is one of the nine that make up the Amazon, although with less than 2% of its territory, was the main critic of Bolsonaro’s policies in relation to the environment. That earned him, in August 2019, a serious confrontation with the far-right president, after posting on Twitter a photo of the Amazon rainforest on fire with the message: «Our house is burning».

At that time, the skyrocketing numbers of deforestation and fires in the Amazon, as well as in other biomes such as the Pantanal or the Cerrado (the savannah), had sparked outrage among a large part of the international community, especially when seeing that Bolsonaro denied the evidence with phrases like: «A tropical forest does not burn».

The Amazon devastation is not just a product of Bolsonaro, who came to power allied with agribusiness lobbies, among others, and with the promise that he was not going to demarcate one more centimeter of indigenous reserve, which he fulfilled to the letter.

In the first years of Lula’s mandate, deforestation figures were higher than the current ones, but after his two terms in the Planalto Palace they had fallen by 67%.A culture of impunity

Lula’s term will start in January, but the eventual positive results of his management will take time to be seen, because, according to specialists, the culture of impunity in that vast region which is the size of Europe has deepened in these four years and that has stimulated the appearance or the establishment of mafias dedicated to exploiting its rich resources.

The leader of the Workers’ Party (PT) will have to combine sustainable economic development in one of the poorest regions of Brazil.

“The election of Lula instead of Bolsonaro is a great relief for all those who care about the Amazon rainforest and the populations that depend on it. It offers the perspective of urgent improvements to the environment, the protection of indigenous peoples and the recovery of science, education and other areas”, said Philip M. Fearnside, a researcher at the Amazon Research Institute (INPA), to Amazonia Real.

But Fearnside stressed the importance of emphasizing that this victory does not mean that the Amazon is ‘saved’ and that «constant vigilance and pressure is no longer necessary to prevent larger impacts in the region».

For Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, Lula will also have the challenge of stopping «the environmental retrogression package (of measures) that is about to be voted on» in Congress, where a large presence of Bolsonarism and its allies will be present from 2023 onwards till there is a new election in Brazil so as to decide new representatives.

“If it passes, it will make the mission of reducing deforestation and defending indigenous populations much more difficult. And that has a direct impact on rural violence and high rates of deforestation», warned Astrini.