Brazil’s President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva should commit to concrete measures to back up his promises on the environment, Human Rights Watch (HRW) said.
In his first public statement after winning the election on October 30, 2022, Lula, pedged to reduce deforestation in the Amazon rainforest to zero, defend Indigenous rights, and take a leading role in responding to the climate crisis.
Lula inherited one of the highest Amazon deforestation rates on record when he took office as president in 2003. By the end of his second term, in 2010, the rate of deforestation had dropped by 67 percent.
Among the measures that led to this result were the effective enforcement of environmental laws, the creation of protected areas, the demarcation of Indigenous territories, and restrictions on access to credit for large landowners who had taken over public land and lacked legal title or had violated environmental laws. But local communities and organizations expressed concern about the high environmental and social impact of dams and other projects his administration promoted in the Amazon.
At COP26, the 2021 climate summit in Glasgow, Brazil signed on to initiatives to reverse forest loss and pledged to end illegal deforestation by 2028. In practice, though, the Bolsonaro administration’s policies have enabled illegal deforestation to increase in the Brazilian Amazon, an ecosystem vital for combatting climate change, while creating an environment of impunity for those responsible.
According to HRW, under Bolsonaro, deforestation in the Amazon increased 73 percent in 2021 compared with 2018, its highest level in 15 years. About 34,000 square kilometers of the Amazon rainforest were cleared between 2019 and 2021, according to official data.
Fires, often used to clear land and prepare it for crops or pasture, soared along-side deforestation. HRW highlights that the number of hotspots, the indicator of fire activity, in the Amazon from 2019 to October 2022 was 368,642. The number of fires from January through October in 2022 is already the highest for the period since 2010.
Scientists have warned that increased deforestation and fires are pushing the Amazon to a “tipping point,” from which the rainforest would not recover, underscoring the urgency to reverse the damage.
The organization says that If this destruction continues, vast portions of the rain-forest may dry out in coming years, rele-asing billions of tons of stored carbon, disturbing weather patterns across South America, and decimating agriculture. Large areas of the Amazon have already been logged and degraded, reducing the forest’s capacity to regenerate, according to q study led by the Amazon Network of Georeferenced Socio-Environmental Information, a consortium of civil society organizations.