This Sunday (5) marks half a century of World Environment Day. The date was established by the UN at the first international conference on the subject, in Stockholm, in 1972.
Also this month is the anniversary of the Rio-92 summit, which after two decades of efforts achieved a treaty to combat global warming. But there’s nothing to celebrate, 30 years after the Rio event — certainly not in Brazil.
The recently ended month of May brought records of fires around here. There were 2,308 fires in the Amazon biome, according to Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), an increase of 96% over the same period in 2021 and the highest record since May 2004.
It’s not just the shooting that causes alarm, but the fact that the driest season and the most favorable for setting fire to the forest is just beginning in May. We have fallen back into the perverse pattern of the time when election years always fueled devastation.
It would not be the first nor the last civilizational setback of the Jair Bolsonaro government, for sure. Here are the figures for deforestation in the Amazon rainforest, on the rise in the first three years of the captain who took the Planalto and harassed the STF with the complicity of Congressional money changers.
The trend appears not only in the satellite sensors used by Inpe’s Queimadas Program, but also in the images of its Deter system. They had already generated a record of deforestation alerts in April, surpassing 1,000 square kilometers for the first time, almost double the same month in 2021.
Nor is it just about the Amazon. The cerrado, which is half the length of the wettest biome to the north, is similarly on fire. Inpe detected no less than 3,578 fire points in May in our savannah.
In other numbers, the number of fires in central Brazil rose 35% last year. It is the highest record for the month of May since 1998, a worrying indication that rural landowners, many armed to the teeth, feel confident in Bolsonaro’s impunity and re-election.
Many environmentalists complain about climate catastrophism, as the bad prognosis suggested by the three decades since Rio-92, once recognized, would lead to discouragement and paralysis. That’s not the case with this column: no one can get their foot out of the mud if they don’t admit they’re stuck.
Around 400,000 square kilometers of Amazon rainforest have fallen to the ground since the Earth Summit in the state capital. More than half of the cerrado turned to ash, most of it after 1992, under the soybean tractor and the cow’s hoof.
Agribusiness regrouped in the ruralist bench, backbone of the center. It modernized the “narrative” (yuck), enlisted an Embrapa data maker (Evaristo de Miranda) to embody the mimimi, occupied Rede Globo’s large estate with the perennial cultivation of “agro é pop”, passed the current in the Forest Code, helped deliver the impeachment coup and elect Bolsonaro.
Goodbye Ibama, ICMBio, Amazon Fund, Conama and Funai. Not an inch of indigenous lands for homologation. Gold prospectors, land grabbers and loggers were welcomed as heroes on the Plateau.
The Paris Agreement (2015) and the sixth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (AR6/IPCC) say that the increase in the average temperature of the atmosphere needs to stay below 1.5ºC by the end of the century, otherwise extreme events will occur. devastating. For this, carbon emissions must be halved by 2030 and neutralized by 2050.
The planet is moving in the opposite direction and has already warmed by 1.1°C. The release of greenhouse gases has increased by 55% in the three decades after 1990. The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is at 420 ppm, up from 280 ppm before the industrial age.
Let there be optimism.
