Amazon faces fresh threat of deforestation

The news from the Brazilian Amazon in recent weeks has looked like a throwback to the dark days of the region’s past.

In March and April, the area of the Amazon that was deforested rose nearly sixfold compared with the same period a year earlier.

Almost simultaneously, the number of reports of killings of environmental activists and farmers in the region has surged.

These events come amid what environmentalists say are fresh threats to the future of the world’s largest tropical forest emerging out of Brasília – a new forestry bill and government plans to build a R$25.8bn ($16.2bn) dam, Belo Monte, on a tributary of the Amazon river.

Critics charge that one of the most important achievements of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva – a sharp decline in the Amazon’s destruction – is suddenly in jeopardy.

“This is a global question not just a Brazilian one,” said Marina Silva, a former Green party presidential candidate and environmental minister.

The Amazon remains one of the world’s most important bulwarks against global warming with an estimated 300m hectares of jungle remaining, or 75 per cent of the original forest cover. Through satellite tracking and better policing, Mr Lula’s government was able to curb illegal deforestation across this huge area without affecting Brazil’s rise as an agricultural super power.

But he left behind some important unresolved issues for his successor, President Dilma Rousseff, including the controversial forestry bill, which Congress approved last month and must go before the Senate.

Environmentalists are most concerned over an amnesty in the bill for illegal clearing prior to 2008. They say this encourages farmers to keep deforesting in anticipation of further amnesties. The bill also eases restrictions on clearing near rivers and on steep hillsides.

Environmentalists say 18m hectares are at risk of deforestation if the bill goes through as it is.

“It’s a very dangerous time,” said Philip Fearnside, an ecologist with the National Institute for Research in the Amazon.

The other main threat to the Amazon Basin are dams, starting with the Belo Monte project, environmentalists say.

Brazil has the best record of any large economy on sustainable energy, with much of its electricity coming from hydropower.

But Mr Fearnside argues Amazonian dams are not as climate friendly as they appear. The submerged vegetation and organic matter in their catchment areas produce methane, a much more potent greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide.

The dams’ turbines also release methane already trapped in the water. It takes a long time for the methane levels in a large dam to decline.

“For the first 41 years, it will be negative as compared with fossil fuels,” Mr Fearnside says of the likely greenhouse effects of Belo Monte.

Proponents of the forestry bill and the dams, however, fiercely dispute those conclusions.

They say that farmers have been turned into criminals by successive changes in the law that have increased the amount of land they have to preserve on their properties as forest (they are required to maintain 80 per cent, up from 50 per cent in 1965).

In addition, they say the new law does not let violators off the hook. They will be forced to reforest parts of their land or equivalent areas in the same region.

The consortium behind the Belo Monte, Norte Energia, argues it has reduced the size originally planned for the dam and will remove vegetation in the flooded area to lower methane levels. For Ms Rousseff, the forestry bill will be a headache when it comes to the Senate in the coming months. She has said he will veto the part containing the amnesty.

“This assumption that you can illegally invade land somewhere and wind up getting it legalised later, it’s just something that has got to stop,” said Mr Fearnside. “That’s something that’s been going on for hundreds of years. You can’t keep doing that because the Amazon is finite.”