Ricardo Galvão, former director of Inpe, should assume the presidency of CNPq

Physicist Ricardo Galvão, former director of Inpe (National Institute for Space Research), should be announced as the new president of CNPq (National Council for Scientific and Technological Development) next week.

The decision, as Sheet found out from people close to the researcher, has not yet been officially confirmed, but has already been taken by the Minister of Science, Technology and Innovation, Luciana Santos.

Galvão is 75 years old, is a professor at the Institute of Physics at USP and was a candidate for federal deputy for São Paulo through the Network, but was not elected. In recent months, he participated in the transition team of Lula’s government.

The researcher became known in 2019 for starring in one of Bolsonaro’s first clashes against the science produced in the country.

In July of that year, when asked by the foreign press about the high levels of deforestation alerts that had been registered by Inpe’s Deter system, Bolsonaro said he was “convinced” that the data were “lies” and accused Galvão of being “at the service of some NGO”.

“I even sent to see who is the guy who is in charge of INPE to come and explain himself here in Brasília, explain these data that were passed to the press”, stated the then president. “In our opinion, this does not match reality. It even seems that he is at the service of some NGO, which is very common.”

It was Bolsonaro’s first denial attack not only on what was happening in the Amazon, which was suffering from a rapid increase in deforestation, but also on data produced scientifically by government agencies. Inpe is linked to the Ministry of Science.

Galvão reacted immediately. In an interview with Estadão, he stated that Bolsonaro manifested himself “as if he were in a bar conversation”, with “inappropriate comments and without any basis”.

The researcher, who had started his career at Inpe in 1970 and had been at the head of the body’s presidency since 2016, stated, in the same interview, that Bolsonaro “took a pusillanimous, cowardly attitude” and said that he expected to be called to Brasília to explain the data. . “And may he have the courage to repeat, looking face to face, into my eyes.”

Bolsonaro never spoke to Galvão, continued to deny the data and exonerated him two weeks later. Inpe’s monitoring, however, continued to show, month after month, that deforestation in the Amazon continued unabated.

In the four years he was in government, the Legal Amazon, an area that encompasses the largest tropical forest in the world, lost 45,586 km^two —an unprecedented 59% increase over the previous four years. In 2022, for the fourth consecutive year, the annual rate of deforestation in the Amazon was above 10,000 km^two.

Galvão’s confrontation with Bolsonaro has borne fruit. At the end of 2019, he was chosen by the British scientific journal Nature as one of the ten people who were most important to science that year, precisely because he defended scientific knowledge before Bolsonaro.

The magazine said Galvão captured global attention when he challenged Bolsonaro for undermining data that showed sharp increases in deforestation rates in the Amazon.

“(These were) acts that he knew would lead to him losing his job. What he didn’t know was that he would become something of a hero, hailed by his fellow scientists as well as strangers on the street. One woman even stopped him on the subway in São Paulo to thank him for standing up to Bolsonaro and helping her understand why preserving the Amazon is important”, pointed out the scientific magazine at the time.

In early 2021, he was also awarded the international prize for Scientific Freedom and Responsibility granted by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).

“Professor Galvão defended sound science in the face of hostility. He acted to protect the well-being of the Brazilian people and the immense natural wonder that is the Amazon rainforest, a world heritage site,” said Jessica Wyndham, director of the Program for Scientific Responsibility, Human Rights and AAAS Law.

At the helm of CNPq, Galvão will have the challenge of helping to recompose the weakened investment in research. The body is the federal government’s main science promotion agency and has suffered successive budget cuts and blockages in recent years.

The ABC (Brazilian Academy of Sciences) recently highlighted that students in the exclusive dedication regime of master’s and doctorate receive by CNPq, respectively, R$ 1,500 and R$ 2,200, amounts that have not been readjusted since 2013.

Upon taking office on January 2, Minister Luciana Santos promised to work to readjust scholarships. According to ABC’s calculation, if corrected only by the accumulated inflation of the period, scholarships should increase to R$ 2,700 for master’s students and to R$ 4,000 for doctoral students.