Analysis: Promising a drop in deforestation was easy, the challenge is to reverse this level

One danger remains after we’ve been through the worst: getting used to it. During the Bolsonaro administration, the Amazon jumped to a new level of devastation, which can become a reference for the celebration of relief in the following numbers. However, more than stopping the new pace of deforestation, the country will need to reverse it, in a very short time.

Deforestation jumped from an average of 7,000 km² —maintained between 2015 and 2018, in a simple average of data from the Prodes system, produced by Inpe— to more than 10,000 km² in 2019, rising again to 10.9 km² in 2020 and for frightening 13,000 km² in 2021. That was when the government, which at the beginning of its mandate was buying a diplomatic crisis with the Europeans for the right to deforest their own territory, decided to hide the data from the world, lying at the UN climate conference when talking about decline in deforestation.

Data from the Deter system (Inpe) released this Friday (12) confirm the consolidation of this level: the devastation of 8,590 km² of the Amazon between August of last year and July of this year is only behind the periods 2019-2020 and 2020-2021.

While deforesters take advantage of what could be the last semester of the amnesty granted by the Bolsonaro government, which paralyzed 98% of the processes of environmental fines, candidates for the Presidency and also for the state governments announce commitments in the opposite direction: the resumption of inspection and environmental policies. .

On the one hand, the extreme example of Bolsonaro’s anti-environmental project serves as a catapult for orienting candidacies towards projects committed to protection. On the other hand, there is a risk that it could become a new parameter for measuring progress.

The risk is that the Bolsonarista parameter creates an environment of comfortable compromises, which represent some relief compared to the lack of control we have experienced in recent years, but which will not free us from environmental and climate collapse. The alternative is to start from scientific guidelines and the most successful experiences.

The new governors will be responsible for covering half of the way — or all the way, in cases of re-election — to the deadline for zero deforestation in the Amazon, between 2028 and 2030.

The end of the decade marks a limit imposed by the goal assumed by Brazil in the Paris Agreement on climate change and also by science, as the current devastation puts us at the point of no return, from which the biome cannot regenerate and begins to lose its tropical forest characteristics.

The end of the decade also coincides with the deadline given by the UN climate panel for countries to cut 55% of their emissions, as a way of avoiding the most catastrophic scenarios of the crisis.

The country already knows part of the path to reversing the current level of deforestation, as it achieved the feat in 2009, when, through actions such as the soy moratorium and the PPCDAm (Plan for the Prevention and Combat of Deforestation in the Amazon), it plunged halving deforestation in the Amazon.

From one year to the next, the rate dropped from more than 12.9 km² to around 7,500 km², according to Inpe’s Prodes system. The downward trend continued and reached a historic low of 4,600 km² in 2012 — at the same time that the agricultural GDP took off, proving the independence of agribusiness in relation to deforestation.

More than repeating the feat, however, the country still needs to correct the omission that led the cerrado to pay, like a piranha ox, for Amazon conservation efforts. At that time, while the government closed the sectoral agreement for the soy moratorium in the Amazon, the cerrado was dominated by export-oriented monoculture.

The devastation of the cerrado was high in 2018 and even fell in the first year of Bolsonaro’s administration, but it grew again and maintained a level close to 4,500 km², according to Deter. In the first seven months of this year, deforestation in the biome has already reached 4,100 km², 29% higher than in the same period in 2021.

Here, once again, the tendency of opposition candidates to adopt the distance of Bolsonarism as a parameter for their environmental positions can leave the country stuck on the edge of the climatic abyss: not only close to the point of no return for Amazon conservation, but also the worsening of water insecurity caused by the devastation of the cerrado. The biome guards the sources of rivers that supply agribusiness and cities in much of the country.

While the Amazon is fundamental for global climate mitigation, due to its carbon stock, the cerrado is an ally of the country’s climate adaptation. Without its conservation, water insecurity, intensified by global warming, can become unavoidable.

Now, in an election period, more than making environmental policy for English to see, the country needs to find its own reasons to discuss the reversal of the Bolsonarista level of deforestation, in the midst of a discussion about the development model.

Although candidates on the left and the right guide environmental policy as a separate chapter in their programs, their plans are inexorably conditioned to climate regulation and the resilience of biomes, whether to discuss food security, energy generation, health or sanitation.

The level of deforestation that we will accept in the coming years indicates — as a kind of budget — the ability to execute the plans offered in these elections. They are already running under the climate crisis clock.