An aerial view shows deforestation at the border between the Amazon and the Cerrado in Nova Xavantina in the state of Mato Grosso (Brazil), July 28, 2021. AMANDA PEROBELLI/ Portal
Of all, it is perhaps Bruno Latour who best summarizes the challenges of Brazil’s elections. On September 12, 2020, the daily newspaper Folha de Sao Paulo published a long interview with the French thinker. The latter predicts on the subject of the climate crisis: “If you [les Brésiliens] find a solution, then the rest of the world is saved. Because nowhere do ecological and political storms come together with such intensity. »
The intellectual, who died on October 9th, could not have been more visionary. Indeed, this Sunday, October 30, two men with radically opposite visions of environmental issues will clash in the Brazilian polls during the second round of the presidential elections. On the left Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, ex-president, defender of nature conservation, and on the far right the outgoing head of state Jair Bolsonaro, who advocates the unrestricted exploitation of nature.
Bruno Latour was not wrong: Brazil’s 156 million voters will hold a good chunk of the future of the planet in their hands. The Latin American giant, as big as Europe, is home to almost a fifth of the world’s biodiversity and, above all, is home to one of the largest carbon sinks on earth: the Amazon rainforest, which is 60% on Brazilian territory. A natural heritage without which no victory against climate change is possible.
Unprecedented killing spree
In this respect, the “Bolsonaro years” look like a catastrophe. All Brazilian biomes, starting with the Amazon, have suffered unprecedented devastation since 2019. Almost 40,000 km2 of forest have been cut down in four years, which corresponds to a country like Switzerland. Every day, 1.5 million trees, or almost 4,000 soccer fields, are cut down in the famous “lungs of the planet”. Unheard of in two decades.
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Despite a shift in discourse under combined pressure from Washington and Brussels, ecocide continues. Between January and September of this year, 9,000 km2 of forest disappeared in the Amazon, ie twice as much as in 2018 and nine times more than ten years ago for the same period. The worst could yet come. Experts recently polled by Folha de Sao Paulo estimate that Jair Bolsonaro’s re-election could lead to record deforestation: up to 27,000 km2 of jungle will be destroyed each year from 2026.
point of no return”
The situation is all the more worrying as the Amazon forest (almost a fifth of which has already been cleared in Brazil) is nearing its point of no return, the jungle swathes into the savannah. A frightening prospect that would endanger the rich fauna and flora of the forest and release incalculable amounts of CO2 into the atmosphere, making any fight against climate change pointless on a global scale.
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