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Date Published: 22/03/2001
Author: Penelope Jacquacu Brazil is planning vast development in the Amazon Basin, denying that it will destroy forest. Penelope Jacquacu reveals the truth. |
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On 19 january, the prestigious American journal Science published an article analysing the impact of Avança Brasil, a huge development project planned for the Brazilian Amazon.1 While the implications of the paper’s findings are profoundly disturbing, its reception was a remarkable illustration of how some government elements will attempt to vilify and undermine unpopular conclusions.
Avança Brasil (Forward Brazil) is designed to increase trade through the expansion of industrial agriculture and mining in the Brazilian Amazon, and provide supportive infrastructure for projects such as the development of the Urucu oil and gas fields. It will include road-building projects, canalising the Araguaia, das Mortes, Xingu, Madeira and Tocantins rivers, hydroelectric projects, mining, and expansion of agribusiness. Overall, the project is slated to cost some $40 billion – a sum that dwarfs the $340 million earmarked by the G7 nations for Amazon conservation under their Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rainforest.
Paying the piper
Much of this $40 billion has been guaranteed by BNDES, the Brazilian national development bank. But significant proportions are also coming from external sources of venture capital. ‘Each project has its own separate sources of funding’, explains Atossa Soltani, from the California-based Amazonwatch. Soltani expresses concern that the projected costs and economic benefits of many of the projects are unrealistic. She cites the example of the Araquaia-Tocantins Industrial Waterway or Hidrovia, for which the budget does not include such things as dredging to keep the managed waterway clear of sediments.
Many analysts believe that Avança Brasil owes its origins to the IMF restructuring of Brazil in the late 1990s. ‘[Mandates] included increasing Brazil’s export earnings and attracting more foreign investments’, explains Soltani. Another was for Brazil to jump-start its construction industry. Avança Brasil will certainly do that.
One key concern is that a number of the projects either proposed or already in progress are ones which have been rejected for funding by the World Bank as being too environmentally damaging. A lack of transparency has been a real problem for those who wanted to check any official environmental impact analyses that were being conducted. ‘We believed that where they were being conducted, they were just rubber stamping official policy’, says Soltani. ‘But without access to the documents, we couldn’t be sure.’
It was in this climate of uncertainty that William Laurance of the Smithsonian Institution and Philip Fearnside from the Brazilian National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA) put together a joint Brazilian-American team to analyse the environmental impacts of Avança Brazil. ‘Our motivation was simply the realisation that the Avança Brazil programme was so massive, and that there had been no systematic attempt to assess its effects… the analysis that led to the Science paper followed quite naturally from that’, explains Laurance. ‘To give the study as strong a factual basis as possible, we decided to base our projections on the kinds of impacts that have happened in the Brazilian Amazon with similar projects in the past’, explains Mark Cochrane, from Michigan State University, a member of the team who has worked on many modeling studies.
Models of uncertainty
Chris Barber, another member of the Laurance/Cochrane team explains: ‘We were using a satellite image-based dataset for the whole Brazilian Amazon. It’s like a giant grid.’ The model has 61 different data layers (for example, new unpaved roads, old railroads and hydro-electric projects would each be considered a data layer). ‘When you mix all these layers up, you end up with a half a million polygons… From this you can make predictions and draw maps’, explains team-member Scott Bergen from Oregon State University.
This complex but sophisticated model allowed the team to produce maps for an optimistic and a non-optimistic scenario. The results of this number-crunching were extremely worrying. The ‘optimistic’ scenario predicted that 28 per cent of the Amazon would be destroyed or heavily damaged over the next 20 years, while the ‘pessimistic’ scenario forecast 42 per cent. Forest loss would be greatest along the southern and eastern areas of the basin, and there would also be extensive fragmentation and degradation of the remaining forest in central and northern Amazonia. Under the pessimistic scenario, few pristine areas will survive outside the western quarter of the region. Only 5 per cent of Brazil’s Amazon would remain in a pristine state (see map on opposite page).
‘If this development plan goes ahead, then even the massive environmental destruction inflicted on the Amazon rainforests during the 1980s and 1990s will appear tiny by comparison’, said Friends of the Earth’s Tony Juniper when the study’s results came out in Science.
Destroying protected areas
The Amazon is dotted with National Parks and other classes of protected areas. ‘We were especially concerned about this’, says Laurance. ‘It was the specific job of one team member to look at the effect of Avança Brazil on such areas.’ Depressingly, the models suggest that even these will be overwhelmed by the destructive trends Avança Brasil unleashes. The same is true for such integrated initiatives as the G7’s Pilot Programme to Conserve the Brazilian Rainforest, and a host of bilateral programmes between the Brazilian and other governments, domestic government projects, and activities of private organisations. ‘Collectively, these programmes involve hundreds of millions of dollars and the energies of many dedicated individuals,’ say the paper’s authors. All this could be swept aside.
Avança Brazil typifies the current top-down planning process in the Amazon, in which mega-projects are proposed and approved long before the environmental costs and risks can be evaluated. Many
projects will create corridors between densely populated areas and the remote Amazonian frontier, which commonly initiate a process of spontaneous colonisation, logging, mining, and land speculation that is almost impossible for governments to control. The result is massive forest loss – and the forest that remains is often so fragmented as to be hardly worthy of the name.
Publicity and the backlash
The publication in Science prompted a blizzard of publicity that nearly overwhelmed the authors. ‘I’ve never been mobbed by the press before’, reported a bemused Laurance, after 150 people, plus TV film crews and their lights, had crammed INPA’s seminar theatre. Among the audience was at least one high-ranking minister, who had flown in especially from the country’s capital, Brasilia. Folha de São Paulo, one of Brazil’s most prestigious newspapers, came out with an editorial in support of the team’s work.
The official Brazilian response was interesting. João Paulo Silveira, the Development Ministry official in charge of the plan, said the paper had ‘no technical foundations’. He said its projections were faulty because it did not consider the effects of recently passed environmental legislation.
The Brazilian Embassy in Washington, DC, commented that the study ‘does not seem to have a sound basis since it takes into account the experience of the last 25 years when none of the different policies [to stop deforestation] now adopted were in place’. In the UK, the Brazilian Embassy released a denouncement which pointed out that the correct current figure for annual deforestation was ‘only’ 1.7 million hectares and not 2.0. To top it all, the Brazilian Science and Technology Ministry issued a bulletin which said that the worst case scenario would see ‘only’ 25 per cent of the Amazon destroyed by 2020.
Getting to the truth
So how valid are the suggestions of flawed methodology? ‘Laurance et al used relationships between roads and deforestation to predict the effects of river channelisation, electric lines, and gas pipelines on deforestation,’ says Dan Nepstad of the Woods Hole Research Centre, Massachusetts. ‘This is, we think, where the guesswork begins. There is no empirical basis for describing how these infrastructural developments will affect the Amazon.’ The Science study has value, he says, but ‘their numbers should be interpreted qualitatively’.
‘It’s true that we used educated guesswork to estimate the likely effects of river-channelisation projects,’ responds Laurance. ‘This was because there are no comparable projects in the Amazon that we could use as examples.’ But he defends the rest of the report. ‘We assumed gas pipelines and power lines would behave like unpaved roads, because such projects require roads for construction and maintenance.’ And he says that the Ecuadorian Amazon provides a telling example. ‘There, roads created to construct gas lines have led to drastic increases in forest destruction, logging, hunting, and land speculation. Most major infrastructure projects can’t proceed without road networks, and those are the real enemies of the rainforest.’
Brazilian criticism also focused on the paper’s supposed ‘anti-development stance’. ‘I cannot speak for my co-authors, but I am not wholly against development in the Amazon’, says Cochrane. ‘But I am interested in the Brazilian people being able to make an informed decision. Avança Brazil has been promoted as a great benefit to Amazonia without any estimation of its environmental costs.’
As for the claim that Brazil’s recent environmental legislation now has everything under control. ‘Past and present attempts to regulate industries such as mining and logging [in Brazil] have proved inadequate because of the lack of resources available to official agencies, corruption and blatant violations of environmental codes,’ says Tony Juniper. Brazilian Philip Fearnside, veteran Amazonian ecologist and author of a review of how Brazil’s environmental law works in practice, shares this opinion. ‘The idea that Brazil’s environmental legislation is such that one can build roads and other infrastructure crisscrossing the Amazon without leading to deforestation is, of course, exceedingly naïve,’ he says. ‘While the new environmental crimes law represents a valuable advance, it is nowhere near being up to such a challenge.’
Seeking alternatives
The team didn’t want to offer up a computer-generated portent of ecological doom without suggesting alternatives. They pointed out that the Kyoto Protocol on climate change could provide substantial remuneration for nations who save their natural forests. ‘Brazil’s government could get paid for not destructively developing Amazonia. There’d be substantial revenues to promote sustainable development in Amazonian communities,’ says Laurance. However, Brazil’s Foreign Affairs Ministry opposes the linking of carbon-offset to deforestation avoidance, seeing this as an infringement of national sovereignty. Instead, they want credits linked to growth of plantation trees, like eucalyptus, and will bring this up at the next climate summit in Bonn in May.
It seems, though, that despite the greenwash, the study has made an impact on the Brazilian government. The most recent response from the Development Ministry is to promise a study of the probable environmental impact of all projects envisaged. To be carried out over the next year, it is expected to cost $400,000 and, according to the Ministry, if environmental damage is feared, projects will be altered.
‘The pledge to do an environmental impact assessment of Avança Brasil indicates at least a step in the direction of informed and rational decision-making,’ says Mark Cochrane. ‘And that’, concludes William Laurance, ‘was what we wanted all along’.
Penelope Jacquacu is a tropical ecologist and journalist with field experience in West Africa, Central & South America, and SE Asia.
She is now working in the Brazilian Amazon.
References on page 65.
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