After years of seemingly unstoppable destruction, Brazil appears to be winning some ground on the Amazon frontier. Is this just a recession-induced calm before the storm, asks Martin Wright – or the start of a rainforest revival?
In Europe, it’s rare to be able to drive for an hour through solid, unbroken forest. In the deep countryside of northern Sweden, perhaps, or on a particularly slow and winding road through the Carpathians.
In Brazil, by contrast, 747s fly for at least that time above an apparently endless sea of forest. If you’re lucky enough to have a window seat, you can look down and see a solid slab of green, from horizon to horizon. A green cut only by the winding loops of vast rivers, and the occasional tiny circular clearings, with no roads leading to or from them, which mark the Amerindian villages.
Until you reach the forest fringes, where the roads, and the fires, begin. Through the haze of smoke, you can see how the forest is being steadily frayed, torn into patches, and eventually destroyed altogether, apart from the odd remnant strip running along a gully.
The sheer visible scale of both the destruction, and of what remains, is breathtaking. It’s one of Brazil’s greatest hopes, and greatest challenges.
Roberto Smeraldi, Founder of Amigos da Terra – Brazilian Amazonia, and one of the most influential of the country’s environmentalists, sums it up: “Brazil ranks third in the list of global contributors to climate change – and two-thirds of its greenhouse gas emissions over the last five years result from land use changes – principally deforestation.”
The simplest cut
After energy, the destruction of tropical forests is by far the largest contributor to climate change – emitting ten times as much as aviation. As has been pointed out elsewhere in Green Futures, (see 'Can finance save forests?') produces a particularly nasty ‘double whammy’ of warming. As they burn, they send vast swathes of greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. And once they’re gone, they can’t soak up the carbon emitted from other sources, like industry, cars and power plants.
The other side of the coin, though, is that conserving forests is one of our most effective tools for staving off runaway climate change. And, since it doesn’t involve making major cuts in industrial or transport emissions, it can be one of the simplest, too. In Brazil’s case, says Smeraldi: “This means that our past and current emission record is not strongly associated with activities which are essential for jobs and economic growth – at least in comparison to the other ‘greenhouse gas superpowers’. This is excellent news for anybody struggling [to mitigate] climate change, since it might prove cheaper for us to engage in radical emission reductions [than it will for other countries].” Some specific good news came with the announcement in November 2009 that Brazil had cut deforestation to its lowest level in more than two decades. Just 2,705 square miles of the Amazon were lost between August 2008 and July 2009, almost half that of the previous 12 months, and the lowest annual total since reliable records started being kept in 1988. Among the factors behind the success, officials said, was the 2004 decision to make the Government as a whole responsible for enforcing forest laws, rather than it being ‘ghettoised’ in the Environment Ministry alone. This led to dramatic improvements in real-time satellite monitoring, which allows forestry police to respond immediately to evidence of logging or burning.
Significant swathes of Amazonia are coming under official federal protection. In the four years to 2008, some 50 million hectares were turned into forest reserves or national parks, and another ten million became indigenous reservations for Amerindian communities.
The news was welcomed by environmentalists. “We have to recognise the great efforts of the federal government, together with state governments, that brought about this drop in deforestation”, said Cláudio Maretti, Head of Conservation at WWF-Brasil. But he warned that there was still a pressing need to firm up the enforcement of forest conservation laws – and to expand other government programmes aimed at offering those living near the forest viable economic alternatives to forest clearance. “That is essential if Brazil is to assume clear commitments in relation to carbon emissions, and if we are really going to take a leadership role in the new green economy.”
Economic factors may well have played a role in the dramatic drop, says his WWF-Brasil colleague, Conservation Director Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza. “We have to recognise that it’s related to the [global recession], particularly to the reduction in demand for commodities, which has meant there is less pressure” on standing forest. As that demand picks up, it will test the Government’s commitment to make further reductions, he warns.
A vital step now, say environmentalists, is for the Government to properly apply – and strengthen – the Forest Code, which dictates that landowners must preserve as forest 80% of any Amazon land they hold. The law is notoriously poorly enforced, and hopes were depressed when the Government recently delayed until 2011 a plan to start prosecutions of those not complying with the law. Conveniently perhaps, this transfers responsibility to President Lula’s successor, who will take office in January of that year.
Tasso Azevedo, Senior Adviser to the Minister of the Environment on Forest and Climate Change, agrees that the hard work lies ahead. “We have actually done most of the cheapest and straightforward things – basic law enforcement, restructuring of the monitoring system, and so forth… Now we’re onto the second level – placing constraints and disincentives in the way of any investment which involve deforestation.”
Some action is underway here, too. The Government has invested in sustainable logging initiatives, and some states are even paying people a small stipend to keep their land forested. And there’s noticeably less reticence on the part of the federal government to getting stuck in at the local level. In a new initiative called Mutirão Arco Verde, Brasilia sent hundreds of officials to the 43 municipalities responsible for more than half the region’s deforestation, to help farmers and authorities there “better understand” and comply with environmental legislation. While this may not have exactly been welcome intervention (shades of “I’m from head office – I’m here to help!”), the Government insisted the aim was to help the municipalities plan for economic growth – albeit of a sustainable kind.
Consumer groups, too, are starting to ratchet up the pressure [see box, ‘Backing the backlash’]. But meanwhile, there’s growing focus on the Cerrado – the vast swathe of savannah-woodland that borders the jungle to the east and south. Deforestation there is increasing, and is thought to be running at twice the rate of that in the Amazon. According to Smeraldi, it’s accounting for around 30% of the emissions resulting from all Brazilian forest destruction, so “it needs to be better measured and taken into account”. Scaramuzza agrees: “The Cerrado is actually much more endangered than Amazonia, because [it’s the focus of] a huge expansion of soya, corn and other commodities”.Setting tough targets for one while ignoring the other could make matters worse, says Smeraldi. “It could create perverse incentives, encouraging developers to switch their destructive activities to the Cerrado.”
Incentives of a positive kind are increasingly seen as the key to forest preservation. Andrew Mitchell, Founder of the Global Canopy Programme and one of the world’s most experienced forest policy thinkers, summed up the challenge when he spoke to Green Futures in 2009 (see 'Can finance save forests?') “At the moment, you can only make money out of forests when you convert them to something else – timber or beef, soy or palm oil... So in global markets, forests are worth more dead than alive. This is what we need to turn around. Philanthropy and governments won’t do it. You have to look to markets to overturn what is in fact a market failure… What we’ve got for free, we don’t pay for.”
As Azevedo put it, unless you pay people not to do something, they’ll carry on doing it. “Say you want to close down an illegal logging site. You can do so in 15 minutes. You just send in the police or the army and lock everything down. But 50 people will lose their jobs.” And unless you create better paid alternatives, they’ll soon be back cutting trees, there or elsewhere. “We have to put something else in place to keep the money flowing and to create a new economy.”
He believes that sustainable forest management – in which timber concessions are awarded and renewed on the basis solely of social and environmental good practice, rather than money – could be at its heart. In Acre state, WWF is working with local communities to implement such a scheme. It would allow the harvest not only of carefully selected, high-value timber, but other products such as Brazil nuts, rubber and essential oils – so long as it could demonstrate that the overall forest remained in good health.
All such schemes, of course, are potentially eligible for carbon funding, too – hence Brazil’s growing enthusiasm for international agreement on the issue. And there may also be ways in which the other huge regional benefits of standing forests, particularly sustaining the water cycle on which so much of Latin American agriculture depends, can be ‘monetised’. (see 'Can finance save forests?')
Azevedo advocates a simple system in which areas which reduced their rates of deforestation would be rewarded on a ‘payment by results’ basis. Brazil could use international carbon funding to invest in a whole range of initiatives to help forest preservation, and he’s particularly excited by the potential of satellite monitoring. This is fast reaching such a level of sophistication that someone with a laptop or even an iPhone could use a Google Earth-style tool to get detailed images of forest cover down to as little as half a hectare. Radar will help ‘see’ beneath cloud cover, so overcoming one of the obstacles to effective monitoring. The results, he promises, “will be totally publicly available. People will be able to download the information”.
None of this will succeed, though, cautions Smeraldi, without successfully engaging those on whom the forest most depends to survive: the people who make a living from it, and live within it. “This is especially true here in Brazil, given the very limited governance in forest areas and on their fringes”, he says, and he identifies two key challenges. First, set up practical financial mechanisms for rewarding local stakeholders directly. Second, sort out the tangle of land titles – or in many cases, lack of them. It won’t be straightforward. “In those cases where you have a clear legitimacy (i.e. legally established indigenous land, extractive reserves and so on) there is usually political reluctance, if not outright resistance, to remunerating local communities. Where you have ranchers and settlers with strong political support, it’s rare to have established land rights.”
Smeraldi acknowledges the recent progress that has been made on curbing Amazon deforestation, but warns that overall it remains fragile. And in terms of Brazil’s performance on climate change more generally, it could still be undercut by the recent oil discoveries [see ‘Oiling the future’]. “We need to keep a close eye on the overall consistency of national policies”, he says – and that means setting clear caps for total carbon emissions. “São Paulo state has set a positive example here, with its goal of a 20% cut in total emissions by 2020.”
For his part, Scaramuzza is cautiously optimistic that Brazil might indeed have pulled its vast forests back from the brink of destruction– and he thinks politics has played its part. “The Government wants to take a strong leadership position; it wants to really establish itself as a major player in the UN. [So President] Lula is assuming a lot of public commitment on this area – we already have a national climate change policy which includes an 80% reduction in deforestation as a target.”
Tasso Azevedo, too, thinks a corner has been turned. “I think that in Brazil, people are finally waking up.”
Intensive farming may have a bad press in Europe, but in Brazil, it could be key to saving swathes of forest. Intensive in relative terms, that is. As Roberto Smeraldi points out, “in the Amazon, we have 71 million heads of cattle on 74 million hectares of pasture” – over one hectare per cow, in other words. Increasing stockage rates to three hectares per cow would still provide ample grazing land, while taking pressure off the forest.
Smeraldi argues that “investments in increased yield productivity should be matched by investment in forest restoration”. Carbon finance could play a role here, he says, helping fund agricultural intensification which, by allowing the forest to recover, would indirectly result in increased carbon sequestration.
Products such as beef or leather which were produced from such ‘intensified’ ranches could be certified as such, he suggests. This would give them a market advantage among purchasers who are increasingly seeking to avoid products associated with rainforest destruction.
Consumer power is starting to slow forest destruction. Environmental groups led by Greenpeace have carried out damaging campaigns against major soy bean, beef and leather producers. Under an agreement signed in 2006 by Abiove, the Brazilian Association of Vegetable Oil Industries, and several environmental groups, major soy bean traders – including food giants such as Cargill – agreed not to purchase soya from areas inside the Amazon Biome deforested after July that year.
WWF is working with these and other companies on a monitoring system to ensure they can live up to their commitments. “It’s been a really positive outcome, building new relationships between NGOs and the private sector”, says Scaramuzza. But he warns that a focus on ‘Amazon-free soya’ might be helping drive destruction in the Cerrado. “It was relatively easy for companies to make this commitment, because only 8% of soya comes from Amazonia”, he says. “So now it’s time for them to raise the bar: to show the same commitment for other regions that they have for the Amazon.”
Meanwhile, the ‘soy moratorium’, which has been extended until at least July 2010, is being held up as a possible template for the beef sector. It’s the combination of the demand for Brazilian beef, soy beans and ethanol, say campaigners, which is behind much of the country’s deforestation. Cattle farmers sell land in the south to soy and sugar cane growers, and use the money to buy cheaper land in the Amazon which they then cut down for cattle pasture.
A Greenpeace study released in June 2009 claimed companies including Wal-Mart, Carrefour, Nike, Adidas, Clarks and Tesco bought beef and leather from Brazilian firms that raised cattle on deforested land. On occasion, it said, forced labour was even involved. The report caused a furor, and wary of a consumer backlash, those and other blue chip firms gave their suppliers until 2010 to implement a serious traceability system that enables them to identify where their beef and leather is coming from.
Just how effective the boycott will be is questionable. There are an estimated five million cattle ranchers in Brazil, and only a tiny percentage have any reliable traceability systems in place. Experts estimate it will take two years just to set up proper monitoring systems for beef. For leather, the issue is even more complex, as it is sold on the open commodities market and so is much harder to track. Nevertheless, the so-called beef moratorium is being heralded as another step in the right direction. “These companies are committing by telling their suppliers they expect to see zero deforestation or they will stop buying from them,” said Tatiana Carvalho, Greenpeace’s Amazon campaigner. “That is a big leap forward.” “The beef sector had been very resistant to change”, says Scaramuzza, “but now they are starting to come to the table.” WWF is working with a sustainable cattle-ranching group – a phrase that would have been an oxymoron just a few years ago. “There is a lot or room for improvement, but they’re starting to recognise the problem – and they want to be part of the solution.” – Andrew Downie / Martin Wright
Atlantic ambition
Not all business waits for a backlash before taking action. On the eastern coast, several companies, including Michelin and Veracel, are taking action to preserve and expand the last remnants of the Atlantic Forest, home to the golden lion tamarin (pictured). They are combining sustainable plantations of eucalyptus, rubber and cocoa trees with ecological corridors linking surviving fragments of woodland. The once vast Atlantic Forest has shrunk to 10% of its original area, but has an unrivalled capacity for regeneration. So projects such as these can make a real difference, say experts.
Martin Wright is Editor in Chief of Green Futures. Additional reporting by Andrew Downie.
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