NOTE ON THIS BLOG

After a long gap between posts, this blog is continuing on the previous domain of www.timhirsch.org, which now includes a more wide-ranging website about my professional activities.

Tim Hirsch.

Forest codes and conspiracies

Anyone who follows Brazilian public discussion over a long period will be familiar with the Amazon conspiracy theory. To outsiders it seems bizarre enough to be laughed off. However, its persistence and resonance with a large section of public opinion (and political elites) makes it no laughing matter for those Brazilians earnestly trying to move the country to a new mindset regarding this environmental superpower's unrivalled biological riches. Now a version of the conspiracy - promoted, puzzlingly, by a Communist congressional deputy - is being used to justify a proposed loosening of Brazil's environmental legislation that could, if passed, jeopardise recent advances in the slowing of deforestation and restoration of ultra-diverse ecosystems.

The theory, touted in various forms over many decades, goes roughly like this. International concern and pressure regarding the destruction of the Amazon (and, for that matter, the rights of indigenous groups) is nothing more than a self-interested plot by, principally, Anglo-saxon rich nations aimed at depriving Brazil of its sovereignty over the Amazon territories, preventing the country from developing and getting their greedy hands on the mineral wealth of the region.

Joined together in the service of this well-organised conspiracy (on which books have been written) are alleged to be forces as diverse as international environmental organisations like the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace, the World Trade Organisation, the British Royal Family and the US federal government. It survives even ham-fisted frauds like the myth of a school geography textbook in the United States showing the Brazilian Amazon as a UN-administered international protectorate - the text accompanying the map circulated via email was quite evidently not written by a native English speaker.

Stoked in particular by military figures including senior serving officers, the conspiracy is regularly resuscitated on the internet, newspaper columns and on TV discussion programmes. I am personally often asked about it by well-educated Brazilians, even those inclined towards green views, and it is periodically fuelled by ill-considered if well-meaning comments from European or US politicians describing the Amazon as "belonging to the world" or some-such phrase.

Now, the spectre of international plots to hold back Brazil's development is being raised to support an attempt in Congress to flexibilise the country's Forest Code - introduced in 1965, ironically just one year after the US-backed military coup that kept Brazil's generals in power until the 1980s.

The code, regarded by its supporters as among the most advanced environmental legislation in the world, imposes well-defined restrictions on the rights of landowners to develop crops and other activities on their property. One element, Areas of Permanent Preservation (APP), defines types of landscape on which native vegetation must be maintained: for example riverbanks, freshwater springs, steep slopes and the tops of hills. In addition, the Legal Reserve (Reserva Legal or RL)is a fixed percentage of the area of a property (excluding the APP) that must be preserved. This is set at 80% in the Amazon forest area, 35% in the transition zone between the Amazon and the Cerrado savanna, and 20% in other ecological regions.

The problem, as a trip to any part of rural Brazil (or even a look on Google Earth) will confirm, is that the Forest Code is largely a fiction. This photo I took of bananas marching up steep slopes to the top of the foothills of one of the most important remnants of the Atlantic Forest, the Jureia-Itatins reserve in São Paulo state, is a typical example of how the code is widely flouted with impunity.

Which begs the question of why the ruralistas, as supporters of the powerful agricultural lobby in Congress are known, should now be going to such efforts to weaken an unenforced law. The reason is that executive regulation that would give state agencies the power to punish those breaking the Forest Code will finally come into force next year, after repeatedly receding into the future.

Under the proposals now before Congress, there would effectively be an amnesty for landowners who breached the forest code before 2008. Each of Brazil's 27 state governments would be given flexibility to vary by 50% the minimum margin of forest cover required along riverbanks - which supporters of the code fear would result in an inevitable "race to the bottom" by authorities keen to please their local farming interests. And the requirement for the Legal Reserve would be removed from smaller landowners, which in the case of the Amazon means farms up to 600 hectares (about 1500 acres).

The case for the changes was put to a special commission of the lower house of Congress by its relator, or rapporteur, deputy Aldo Rebelo, of the Brazilian Communist Party, and it is available in full (Portuguese only) on his blog.

The thrust of the 36-page report is that the current code puts some 90% of Brazilian agricultural producers into a position of illegality, and that entire sectors such as wine-growing in the Southern states would be unviable if it were to be strictly enforced, as vines are largely grown on the steep slopes of the region. Moreover, it imposes an unfair disadvantage on Brazilian farmers compared to overseas competitors, where no such code exists to protect forests. All reasonable-sounding stuff, although the claims can be and are disputed by those who support the code, while admitting that some refinements could and should be made.

But what jumps out of the Rebelo report is an extraordinary, rambling diatribe against those who wish to impede "progress" by limiting deforestation, ranging over Malthus, Marx and the director of Avatar, James Cameron. The alleged role of international NGOs in promoting the interests of Brazil's Northern competitors is put explicitly and graphically.

"Looking at the efforts of some foreign non-governmental organisations to oppose the expansion of our agricultural frontier, one must ask oneself ... are they here for our good or our goods?" asks Rebelo.

And after lambasting what he calls the "anthropophobia" of the rainforest campaigners, Rebelo continues:

"Embarrassed by the evidence of their petty ambitions, the rich nations use the long arm of their NGOs, who disembark in Brazil as bearers of good news in defence of nature, but cannot hide the cause they are really espousing: the interests of the nations where they have their headquarters, and from where they receive their abundant funding.

"The pretence of foreign 'indigenist' and environmentalist NGOs at protecting the [Amazon] territory and inhabitants makes a mockery of the Brazilian state and people."

The allegation of connivance between foreign governments and NGOs is made more explicit in the case of the Netherlands, which briefly took control of the North-East Brazilian sugar plantations in the 17th century, and also happens to be the world headquarters of Greenpeace:

"Shorn of its former military and commercial power, today Holland satisfies itself with hosting and financing its paramilitary arms, the inevitable NGOs, which try to fulfil the role of its old armies and trading companies." Entertaining stuff, but remember this is an official document of the Brazilian Congress.

What Rebelo is suggesting, and the same has been claimed by agricultural spokespeople on television and in the press, is that the campaign to maintain and enforce a strong Forest Code in Brazil is being masterminded and controlled by foreign agricultural lobbies, principally in the United States, to stifle competition from Brazilian products such as soya, ethanol and bananas. The idea of activists from Greenpeace and the corn barons of the Midwest holding secret meetings to plot against Brazilian farmers may seem a little fanciful, but this does not deter the conspiracy theorists or the widespread belief in their message.

All of which naturally infuriates the home-grown Brazilian environmental movement that is trying to mobilise public opinion in support of the existing Forest Code, and its effective implementation. In campaign called Exterminadores do Futuro, the name given to the Schwarzenegger Terminator movies in Brazil, the group SOS Mata Atlântica (Save the Atlantic Forest) portrays the ruralistas as chainsaw-wielding vandals intent on destroying what is left of Brazil´s extraordinary biodiversity.

The fear of these groups is that if the Forest Code is weakened, it could reverse recent gains such as the sharp fall in the rate of Amazon deforestation, and serious attempts to restore the Atlantic Forest, a global biodiversity hotspot which has already lost some 93% of its original extent.

The vote on Rebelo's proposed changes was originally scheduled for today, Tuesday 15th June, when Brazil's eyes would have been on matters a little further afield - like its first match in South Africa, against North Korea. Now it has been delayed until next week. Watch this space.


Copyright Tim Hirsch, 2010. All rights Reserved.

Beef roasting the earth

Beef production accounts for around half of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions, according to a new study by leading scientists.

The report, to be launched at the Copenhagen climate conference Saturday, estimates that annual emissions linked to Brazilian cattle rearing varied between at least 813 million and 1.09 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent per year between 2003 and 2008.

The biggest contribution came from deforestation to create cattle pasture, with a significant portion (over a quarter in 2008) resulting from enteric fermentation, the emission of methane and nitrous oxide from the digestive processes of livestock.

Although Brazil’s cattle herd of more than 190 million has often been linked to environmental impacts, especially in the Amazon, this is the first time its emissions have been systematically calculated and linked to the latest inventory of the country’s climate footprint.

The scientists, from two Brazilian federal universities, the national space research institute (INPE) and Friends of the Earth, believe the actual emissions from beef production are higher than those presented in the study. This is because it did not take account of soil carbon emissions from degraded cattle pasture, the production of cattle feed, or transport of cattle and beef – which together could add significantly to the total.

The biggest single source of emissions from cattle production arose from deforestation in the Amazon, around three-quarters of which can be attributed to demand for pasture, according to the study. Beef-related emissions from clearing of the Amazon varied between 718mt CO2e in 2003, a peak year for deforestation, and 442mt CO2e in 2008.

Significant emissions from creation of new pasture were also identified in the Brazilian savanna region, known as the Cerrado. The report estimated that conversion of this ecosystem to beef production resulted in an average of 136.5 mtCO2e per year between 2003-2008, more than half of the emissions linked to Cerrado deforestation.

Enteric fermentation from cattle across the whole of Brazil was estimated at 234 mtCO2e for 2008.

The latest estimate of Brazil’s total greenhouse gas emissions, from preliminary figures for the ministry of science and technology’s second inventory for the UN climate convention, is approximately 2.2 billion tonnes of CO2 equivalent for 2005.

With nearly half of that attributed to a single sector, the study argues that efficiencies in beef production represent the most important opportunity for mitigating Brazil’s climate impacts.

“This does not imply a cut in current production, and may even be compatible with a moderate increase,” said INPE’s Carlos Nobre, one of Brazil’s leading climatologists and a co-ordinator of the study.

Among the measures recommended by the study to reduce beef-related emissions are:
· Integration of livestock and crop production to reduce the need for conversion of more forests or savannas for pasture.
· Investment in recuperation of degraded pasture land, to increase productivity of cattle ranching
· Elimination of the use of fire in pasture management
· Changes in cattle diet, including feed supplements and different grazing crops, to reduce methane emissions
· A reduction in the current impunity perceived to exist for cattle ranchers who break the law by expanding their pastures into public forest lands, stimulating uncontrolled land speculation in the Amazon.
· The use of mechanisms such as REDD Plus to catalyse good practice and encourage low-carbon forms of beef production

According to Roberto Smeraldi of Friends of the Earth, another co-ordinator of the study, a drastic fall in the carbon intensity of the Brazilian beef industry is required if it is to be economically sustainable.

“Based on the study, we established that the cost of carbon emissions per unit of production was greater than the wholesale price,” Smeraldi said.

An edited version of this article was published by Point Carbon news.

Brazil's complex climate conundrum

The role of Brazil in global climate change is as full of contradictions as the much-misunderstood country itself.

On the one hand, it will be among the small group of developing countries to enter December's UN climate talks in Copenhagen with a quantified target for cutting emissions. Although, as foreign minister Celso Amorim put it in an interview I reported on a couple of weeks ago, for "theological" reasons it will probably not be called a target.

On the other hand, as reported in the last post of this blog, Brazil's fossil fuel emissions are rising fast. Having been almost totally dependent on (extremely controversial) large hydro-electric dams for electricity, the energy ministry is backing a plan to build dozens of new coal and fuel-oil power stations, desperate to avoid a repeat of the energy rationing imposed a few years back to prevent blackouts.

Even more significant in the rising trend of energy emissions is the ever-greater volume of traffic choking Brazil's roads and highways. Inter-city passenger rail services are non-existent (although a much-overdue fast rail link between Rio and São Paulo is now in the pipeline), so increased mobility is entirely picked up by road and air transport. Even the exceptionally high use of biofuels cannot prevent this adding significantly to greenhouse gas emissions.

Ironically, as Brazil is lauded in international circles for its "leadership position" amongst developing countries on tackling climate change through exploitation of renewable energy, at home the big discussion now is over who will get the royalties for massive oil extraction from the so-called "pre-salt" layer off the country's Atlantic coast.

The reason Brazil is able to walk into the Copenhagen talks with an ambitious climate policy is that it seems finally to have got a handle on Amazon deforestation, until recently judged to be responsible for the bulk of its carbon dioxide emissions. The emissions-reduction "number" it brings to the table is likely to be a refinement of the target it already declared last year in its National Climate Change Plan, to reduce annual deforestation 70% by 2018, compared with the 10-year average from 1997-2006. The Brazilian government calculated that this ambition, if achieved, would prevent carbon emissions equivalent to an entire year's emissions from the European Union.

The most recent figures suggest that Brazil is well on the way to meeting that target, although here too there are contradictions. Certainly, the annual rate of destruction in the Amazon has come down considerably since a peak in 2003-4, when more than 27,000 square kilometres of rainforest were clear-cut. Three successive years of sharp decline were followed by a blip last year, probably linked to high food prices, which saw a 12% rise over the previous year. Even so, the 2007-8 figure of 12,900 square kilometres still represented a drop of one-third over the ten-year average.

Even more significantly for the government's position at Copenhagen, it is likely that just about the time the conference takes place, Brazil will be announcing its lowest Amazon deforestation figure for 20 years. Despite a sharp monthly increase for July, all the indications are that the period August 2008 to August 2009 (the official satellite data use this dry-season period to judge annual change to take advantage of maximum visibility) will reveal deforestation well below 10,000 square kilometres. A large part of this is likely to be due to the economic downturn, as deforestation is closely linked to demand for commodities such as soya and beef; but the government will also be able to claim credit for the impact of policies such as crackdowns on illegal sawmills, confiscation of cattle grazing in protected areas, and cutting off credit to rural landowners breaking environmental rules.

Clearly the real test will come once the global economy bounces back, and only then will it be clear whether deforestation is being effectively reduced. There are other reasons, too, why a simple correlation between annual deforestation and Brazil's carbon emissions may not be valid.

One has been emphasized by the government's own National Space Research Institute (INPE), responsible for compiling and interpreting the satellite data that are the world's window on what is happening in the Amazon. Recently it has started to analyse the images to estimate the area of degraded forest, as well as the clear-cut areas given in the main annual statistics. The first year for which data were available, 2007-8, showed an alarming 60% increase in the area of forest degradation over the previous year, suggesting that the official figures on which the Brazil's record is judged tell only a partial story. Large-scale degradation of rainforest implies a loss of biomass and therefore carbon - apart from the fact that a degraded forest now is more likely to go up in smoke and become cattle pasture next year.

The other question mark over a simple CO2-deforestation link was emphasized in a paper published last week by a team of scientists from Stanford University, in the journal Geophysical Research Letters.. It suggests that because the pattern of deforestation has been for clearances to move progressively deeper into the forest from the agricultural frontiers to the East and South, the amount of biomass destroyed by clearance of a single hectare has increased over time. The paper's estimate is that between 2001 and 2007, the amount of above-ground organic matter lost from the clearance of each hectare increased on average from 183 to 201 tonnes of carbon. Since the remaining areas of the Amazon are denser still, even a constant rate of deforestation would lead to a 25% increase in emissions, the study reckoned.

In fact, this conclusion is double-edged as far as climate politics (and economics) is concerned. Even though it may imply the emission reductions in recent years have been over-stated, it also suggests the remaining areas of rainforest are even more valuable to the world in preventing runaway climate change. That could be an important factor in raising the stakes for the world to pay up for reducing deforestation through the so-called REDD mechanisms (reducing emissions through deforestation and degradatation) featuring prominently on the Copenhagen agenda.

Brazil's climate halo challenged

Brazil’s energy, industrial and transport sectors now account for some 30 per cent of the country’s greenhouse gas emissions – compared with just 18 per cent in 1994.

The conclusion from preliminary figures in the latest inventory of Brazilian emissions suggests that deforestation and other land-use changes play a much less dominant role than the commonly-quoted 75 per cent of carbon dioxide emissions.

A study for Brazil’s environment ministry estimates that CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels for transport, industry, electricity and other uses increased from some 225 million tonnes in 1994 to 334 million tonnes in 2007, a rise of 49 per cent.

Part of the rise stems from increased use of fossil fuels in the generation of electricity, which saw emissions from this sector more than double in the 13-year period, although hydro-power continues to contribute the overwhelming proportion of Brazil’s domestic generating capacity.

The greater use of fuels such as gas, coal and oil in power generation led to an increase in the carbon intensity of Brazil’s power sector from 42 tonnes of CO2 per Gigawatt-hour in 1994, to 54 tonnes in 2007.

Transport

The bulk of the increase in fossil fuel emissions came from road transport, despite the increased use of sugarcane-derived ethanol which is now capable of powering some 90 per cent of new cars with “flex-fuel” engines, able to run on any mixture of gasoline and alcohol.

Some 50 million tonnes of additional CO2 emissions are estimated to be emitted each year from Brazil’s roads and highways, with the majority (30m) coming from diesel, and the next biggest portions from gasoline (15m) and natural gas (5m).

Fossil fuel CO2 emissions from industry rose nearly 40 per cent, from 74 million tonnes in 1994 to 103 million tonnes in 2007.

The figures are part of a comprehensive inventory of Brazil’s greenhouse gas emissions due to be published before the end of the year. It will be the first assessment of the country’s emissions since its official submission to the UN climate change convention in 2004, which was based on 1994 greenhouse gas data.

Deforestation

Although figures for the agricultural sector and deforestation have yet to be published, officials are publicly speculating that each is now reckoned to account for about a third of total emissions.

This suggests that aggressive action on reducing deforestation, although important, will go only part of the way towards curbing the growth in Brazilian emissions.

However, a new study indicates that recent efforts to prevent deforestation in the Amazon are having a globally-significant impact on carbon dioxide emissions.

The study, by the Worldwide Fund for Nature (WWF), University of Minas Gerais and the Amazon Research Institute (IPAM), estimates that new protected areas created since 2003 under the Amazon Protected Areas Programme (ARPA) will prevent emissions of more than five billion tonnes of CO2 by 2050.

That adds up to some 16 per cent of current annual global emissions and 70 per cent of the total savings envisaged in the first commitment period of the Kyoto Protocol.

This article was published at www.pointcarbon.com

Partial veto on Amazon land law

The Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva has approved a controversial new law that will enable farmers in the Amazon to acquire title over an area of public land larger than France.

But President Lula vetoed two of the most contentious clauses in the bill, which would have allowed absentee landlords and companies to benefit from the transfer.

The measure is designed to end the chaotic state of land ownership in the region, in which hundreds of thousands of farmers do not have legal title to their land, with many claims dating back decades.

Under the “regularization”, title will be granted to occupiers who can show they occupied the land peacefully before the end of 2004. Plots of up to 100 hectares will be handed over for free, those up to 400 hectares will be available at a nominal rate, while those between 400 and 1500 hectares will be transferred at market rates, but with a 20-year payment period.

The legislation, originally proposed by the government, was altered significantly in Brazil’s Congress by deputies linked to the country’s powerful rural lobby. Under pressure from several ministers, Lula agreed to strike out two of those changes: one would have enabled title to have been given to land-holders not resident in the region, and the other would have allowed corporate bodies to benefit from the measure.

However, Lula allowed another of the controversial changes to stand: beneficiaries of the land transfer will be allowed to sell on larger holdings within three years, instead of a ten-year minimum as proposed in the original measure. Environmental groups fear this could heat up land speculation in the region and threaten anti-deforestation measures.

Among the critics of the new land legislation are a group of federal prosecutors in the region, who claim it is unconstitutional. They cite the fact that it could allow the transfer of public land to people who acquired it fraudulently, and that it does not explicitly protect the rights of traditional and indigenous communities.

The legislation gets its approval as the latest satellite data from the Brazilian National Space Research Agency suggests there has been a sharp drop in Amazon deforestation during recent months, although heavy cloud cover has meant that the survey was very incomplete.

Copyright Tim Hirsch 2009. All Rights Reserved.

The great Amazon giveaway

Brazil’s environment minister Carlos Minc is calling on President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva to veto parts of a new land law which could undermine efforts to conserve the Amazon rainforest.

The measure, originally proposed by the government, would transfer an area of public land larger than France (670,000 square kilometres) into private hands.

The aim is to “regularize” hundreds of thousands of land-holdings in the region whose occupiers have never been granted legal title, with some claims dating back decades. The “land chaos” of the Amazon is widely seen as a barrier to effective enforcement of anti-deforestation measures, and a major cause of violent conflict in the region.

But Minc and others fear that changes made to the law in the Brazilian congress will provide incentives for speculators to occupy new areas of forest in the expectation that title will eventually be recognized.

Environmental groups have warned it is part of a sustained attack on environmental safeguards in Brazil which could jeopardize progress in reducing deforestation. Brazil’s National Climate Change Plan, agreed last December, includes a target to reduce annual forest loss in the Amazon by 70% in the next decade, representing avoided emissions estimated at 4.8 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide.

President Lula presented the “provisional measure” in February as a means of giving security to some 300,000 smaller farmers in the Amazon region. The smallest holdings (up to 100 hectares) would be donated for free; medium-sized units would be transferred for a nominal charge; and larger estates (up to 1,500 hectares) would attract market prices but with a 20-year payment period.

In the version of the law passed last week by Brazil’s senate, critical safeguards in the original measure had been altered by legislators linked to the country’s powerful rural lobby.

For example, a ban on the re-sale of newly-privatized land within 10 years was reduced to a three-year time limit. In addition, corporate and non-resident landholders would be entitled to benefit from the transfer, which was originally restricted to private individuals living in the area.

Non-governmental organizations in Brazil have warned that this would amount to an amnesty for illegal land-grabbers, and would heat up speculation in forest areas earmarked for improved access, such as where highways are being paved.

A joint statement issued by 28 NGOs, including Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, said the measure was among a series of current attempts to dismantle Brazil’s environmental legislation.

“It opens up the possibility of legalizing the situation of a great number of fraudulent land-claimants, incentivising an assault on our public heritage, the concentration of land ownership and the advance of illegal deforestation,” the statement read.

Quoted on the environment ministry website, minister Minc said he would be appealing to president Lula to veto those articles added to the land measure by the Congress, which he said had “disfigured” the original proposal.

“I can’t guarantee that Lula will veto them, but we are going to ask,” said Minc.

Carlos Minc has been involved in an increasingly public battle with government colleagues, notably the agriculture minister Reinhold Stephanes, over other proposed changes to Brazilian environmental legislation. Among the most controversial is a plan to flexibilise Brazil’s 44-year-old Forest Code, which requires landowners to keep a minimum proportion of a property in native vegetation – 80% in the Amazon, and 20% in other areas – and to maintain forest cover along river-banks, hilltops and steep slopes.

Minc recently warned that that attempts to weaken Brazil’s environmental laws would be going against the tide of history and current global trends. He added that if measures such as the land rules increased deforestation, it would mean the end of Brazil’s climate change plan, and of the Amazon Fund set up to attract climate-linked investment in forest protection.

A version of this article was published by Point Carbon

Rebuilding a rainforest

A newly formed alliance of green groups, government agencies and private companies has set for itself the ambitious goal of returning the country’s threatened Atlantic Forest to nearly a third of its original size.
Often overlooked amid concern about the vast Amazon rainforest, the richly-varied Atlantic Forest is considered one of the world’s most biodiverse areas—more so, acre for acre, than even the Amazon. Carved up for centuries as Brazil’s coastal development expanded and turned inland, the forest is estimated today to possess little more than 7% of its original area in blocks large enough to sustain a reasonable variety of species. However, hundreds of thousands of tiny forest fragments and degraded scrubland could add as much as 13% to this figure. So some 20% of the original 1.5-million-square-kilometer biome that existed prior to European settlement may already be in some sort of forest cover.
The core proposal of the new Atlantic Forest Restoration Pact is, by 2050, to restore native forest to a further 150,000 square kilometers—an area the size of Illinois—using a combination of unproductive farmland and areas which under Brazilian law should in any case be left undisturbed by human activities.
The pact, announced last month, brings together more than 50 organizations including non-governmental groups, institutions linked to federal, state and local authorities as well as corporate and private landowner associations. It does not include commitments of increased funding for the conservation work. Instead, the aim is to harmonize the many individual efforts to restore Atlantic Forest woodlands, pooling technical knowledge and providing annual updates of progress towards the target.
The coordinator of the pact, Miguel Calmon of the U.S.-based green group The Nature Conservancy (TNC), says much of the effort would involve helping landowners obey Brazil’s Forest Code, which requires all properties to retain native vegetation on 20% of their land, as well as on riverbanks, steep slopes, hilltops and near water sources.
“If we can create the mechanism and instruments to help landowners comply with the law, then at the end of the day we can achieve a common goal to have 30% of the original forest—which is really the minimum we feel is necessary to promote biodiversity conservation and to generate all the ecosystem services, especially water—for the millions of people living in the Atlantic Forest,” Calmon says.
The original Atlantic Forest biome extends some 3,000 kilometers (1,900 miles) along the Brazilian coastline and inland as far as Paraguay and northern Argentina. It includes most of country’s major cities including São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Salvador; a total of some 130 million people live within its boundaries, accounting for 70% of the country’s population.
So it is not surprising that this forest, positioned in the path of five centuries of settlement and development of Brazil’s eastern seaboard, has been sliced up to a far greater extent than the less accessible Amazon. Only recently have urban Brazilians begun to realize the value—and vulnerability—of this biodiversity treasure chest on their doorstep.
The term Atlantic Forest, or Mata Atlântica in Portuguese, actually refers to a mosaic of contrasting ecosystems ranging from just 3 degrees south of the Equator to below the Tropic of Capricorn; and from the sandy restinga forests at sea level to mountain forests and grasslands up to an altitude of more than 2,700 meters at the highest point of Brazil’s coastal range.
This has given the biome an extraordinary variety of plant and animal life, unrivalled on the planet. Of the more than 20,000 plant species found in the Atlantic Forest, some 8,000 occur nowhere else in the world; it is also home to nearly 1,000 bird species, 372 amphibians, 350 fish, 197 reptiles and 270 known species of mammal.
Of the many superlatives linked to the Atlantic Forest, one staggering statistic stands out. In a survey of one of the richest parts of the ecosystem, in the state of Bahia, more than 450 different tree species were identified in a single hectare of forest. The entire United Kingdom is thought to have only 33 genuinely native tree species.
What qualifies the Atlantic Forest as a biodiversity hotspot is the combination of this staggering variety with a high level of threat, due to its location. The forest has lain in the path of ever-growing human activity since the arrival in Brazil of Portuguese explorers in 1500—or arguably before then, as indigenous peoples arrived on the Atlantic coast and began making significant changes to the ecosystem.
The original forest has been devastated by successive cycles of exploitation of the region’s resources. There was the uncontrolled harvesting of Pau Brasil or brazilwood trees to create coveted red dye for the European textile industry (making this the only country to take its name from a tree); the clearing of large swathes of forest in northeastern Brazil for slave-worked sugar plantations; and the cattle-hide and coffee booms of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the strongest pressures more recently was the felling of the interior forest of southern Brazil to make way for construction around such cities as São Paulo and Curitiba and for industrial-scale plantations of crops such as soy and sugarcane.
After all this buffeting through centuries of agricultural, industrial and urban development, the biggest surprise is perhaps that enough of the Atlantic Forest is left for it to be one of the power-houses of global biodiversity. Even the fragmented remains of the ecosystem are estimated to account for as much as 8% of the total number of species on the planet.
The question is, for how long? Nearly 400 animal species in the region are currently judged to be under threat of extinction. And the most recent research of the state of the forest indicates just how fragile much of this biodiversity really is.
In the June issue of the journal Biological Conservation, devoted to the Atlantic Forest, a new study reveals that some 80% of the remaining ecosystem exists in fragments of less than half a square kilometer, and nearly half of it is less than 100m from the forest edge, leaving it highly vulnerable to pressures from the surrounding areas such as invasive alien plant species.
All this makes the task of restoring 30% of the forest a huge challenge. One of the principal aims of the new pact is to learn from 30 years of experience of forest restoration in the region, to establish which techniques work and which do not, so that money and effort is not wasted. For example, some early attempts at reforestation proved short-lived because only fast-growing tree species were used. Once they reached maturity, they died, and none of the slower-growing, larger varieties were coming up to replace them.
Recent restoration work has involved native species and more sophisticated approaches aimed at replicating the natural “succession” phases of a forest—for example, when a big tree dies and the race begins to capture the sunlight suddenly exposed. First to emerge are the “pioneer” species, quick-growing, spindly trees that shoot up to grab the light; underneath their partial shade comes the so-called secondary growth; and finally the “climax” species, the tortoises of this race that emerge inconspicuously in the undergrowth but become the mighty giants of the rainforest canopy.
For restoration efforts to be long-lasting, the recognized best practice involves understanding this dynamic architecture of a living forest, as well as the interactions with birds and mammals that disperse the seeds and help maintain genetic diversity. So when tree seedlings are planted in a cleared area, for example, it is vital to have a variety of species from each stage of succession. Knowledge of soil type and climate is also essential, and successful restoration involves various interventions such as control of ants and clearing of invasive grasses in the early stages of tree growth. It is hard, and it is expensive.
The president of the Atlantic Forest Biosphere Reserve, Clayton Lino, is acting as a focal point for all the disparate groups involved in this pact. He admits that it is impossible to recreate all the features of the original forest, but believes that many of the important functions of the ecosystem can be restored by connecting and expanding the existing fragments.
“I think it is realistic and ambitious at the same time,” Lino says of the 30% target. “Realistic because we need to do this, and we have the potential areas and the potential partners. Many people want to protect and restore these areas. On the one side we have the law and its enforcement, and on the other we have the will—together, we can do this.”
An important part of the restoration strategy will be to involve some of the big, corporate landowners keen to present an environmentally responsible face to the world. For example, big sugarcane estates faced with European doubts about the sustainability of the ethanol they produce now have good commercial reasons to ensure that they restore forests on the 20% of their land they are required by law to keep undisturbed.
Restoration efforts also are being undertaken by large timber companies growing exotic eucalyptus and pine for the pulp and paper industries. In the past, these companies, which were tainted in the past for replacing native forest with monocultures, are now involved in some of the biggest projects of Atlantic Forest restoration.
A major question mark hangs over the pact, however. Even if the targets for restoration are realistic—a big if for conservation experts—the initiative is launched at a time when Brazil’s forest-protection laws are under pressure as never before. As recently as March, the legislative assembly of Santa Catarina—currently the state with the highest rate of Atlantic Forest destruction—voted to relax the rules on preserving riverside and slope forests, under pressure from the agricultural lobby. (See related story—this issue.)
The Nature Conservancy’s Calmon says this decision was made in the very state that suffered disastrous floods and landslides at the end of 2008, with the death toll due at least in part to the construction of houses on steep hillsides where forests were supposed to have been protected. Moves are also under way in the Brazilian Congress to flexibilize the Forest Code at a federal level.
“What we as a coalition of NGOs, private sector and governments and landowners can show to society is that complying with the forest code right now, in the Atlantic Forest, is a much better solution in the long term than not to comply with it.” says Calmon. “Our job is to show them that if you can really tie what you are trying to do to tangible benefits to business, to the people, maybe we will have a chance to minimize some of the pressure on the forest code. But I agree it is a big challenge.”

This article appears in the May issue of EcoAméricas (www.ecoamericas.com)

Climate paralysis

Post-2012 uncertainty is hampering investment in small clean energy projects, an ethanol producer has said.

Reberth Machado, executive director of Bioenergia do Brasil, said uncertainty over the future of the clean development mechanism (CDM), combined with the current financial crisis, is jeopardising plans to expand a sugarcane plant that also earns CDM credits.

“The whole market is entering into a panic mode. Nobody knows what is going to happen, therefore nobody is doing anything,” Machado told Point Carbon in an interview.

Machado’s company operates Lucélia, the first sugarcane mill in Brazil to earn credits through the CDM.

Lucélia processes 10,000 tonnes of sugarcane each year from its 28,000 hectare estate, and earns CDM credits from the use of bagasse – the woody residue from the cane crop – to power steam boilers and generate electricity.

This power has been used for the production process at Lucélia since 1981, but from 2002 about half of it has been exported to the grid.


Bioenergia saw the opportunity of gaining credits through the CDM to help finance a more efficient boiler, giving the plant surplus electricity.

It is seeking $30 million to install a new boiler, and to increase the generating capacity at the mill from 12 to 28MW and the power exports from six to 21 MW.

It contracted the project developer and aggregator Ecosecurities to calculate the carbon savings and go through the UN registration procedure, receiving in return the rights to commercialise the certified emission reductions (CERs).

Machado said that the seven-year contract with Ecosecurities was ending this year – and was not going to be renewed, leaving the company unable to earn further credits.


The problem, he said, was that with less than three years left under the Kyoto protocol, the volume of credits produced by the plant – 10,000-15,000 CERs per year – was not sufficient to guarantee recovering the investment in revalidating the project.

“They are killing the small to medium-sized projects, just by not having enough time until 2012 to get the money back, and nobody knows what’s going to happen after 2012,” said Machado.

“For the new plant, it is just that much more difficult to attract investors now. Especially international investors that would be looking at the CO2 as an incentive to put the money down, and allow the project to go ahead,” he said.

Ecosecurities’ head of implementation, Belinda Kinkead, confirmed Machado’s account of their dealings with the CDM project.

She pointed out that at the end of 2008, the average time to validate a project was 329 days, plus an additional average of 191 days to register it – so the window to validate new CERs before 2012 was rapidly closing.



Kinkead added that prices for validations and verifications had almost trebled in the last 12 months, meaning that it was not cost-effective to verify 10,000 CERs if the process alone was going to cost €2/tonne.

“Couple that with volatile carbon prices, high price expectations from project developers, global economic conditions and a lot of speculation about whether CDM will continue to exist in its current form post-2012, and many market players are becoming much more risk averse,” Kirkhead told Point Carbon.

Ecosecurities compared the current situation with the “wait and see” attitude that prevailed in the market prior to the coming into force of the Kyoto protocol in 2005.

“There is no doubt that this will impact development of greenhouse gas reducing projects,” said Kinkead. “The sooner there is greater clarity on what will exist post-2012 the better for investors and project developers alike.”

This article was published on the Point Carbon website.

Who owns the Amazon?

On January 9th this year, 13 family members from the Paresi indigenous community settled down to an evening’s fishing on a dammed-up section of the Cágado stream, on the Southern fringes of the Amazon basin in the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso.

Just before 10pm, two employees of the nearby Boa Sorte (“Good Luck”) ranch, including its manager, appeared on the scene. Shots rang out, and most of the Indian group fled.

The precise circumstances of the incident are still in dispute. According to the Paresi, one of the employees shouted “You fish thieves!” before opening fire on the unarmed family. The ranch manager claims he came under attack after approaching suspected poachers on the private reservoir, and fired in self-defense.

About the end result, however, there is no dispute. When the family returned to the scene, they found the 42-year-old outspoken Paresi leader Valmireide Zoromará dead, apparently shot in the back. Her husband, Valdenir, not an indigenous person, was seriously injured with a bullet in his head. The two ranch-hands are now in prison being investigated for murder.

Apart from being 2009’s first recorded incident of a fatal confrontation involving Brazil’s indigenous people, the episode was unfortunately nothing out of the ordinary in this violent region – at least 53 Indians were killed in 2008, according to the indigenous rights organization Cimi -- and it has had only limited coverage in the national press.

It had a familiar ring in another important respect. In common with just about every case of rural shootings in the Amazon, including those with international repercussions such as the assassinations of rubber-tappers’ leader Chico Mendes in 1988 and Sister Dorothy Stang in 2005, its root cause is alleged to be the chronic problem at the heart of the Amazon’s woes: uncertainty over land rights and ownership.

In the case of the January 9th killing, Valmireide Zoromará had fought for years for the the Paresi to be given legal rights to their traditional lands, challenging the ownership claims of local ranchers. She had recently fled her home village because of death threats.

As with everything else involving the Amazon, the dimensions of the land problem are staggering. According to a report published last year by the Amazon Institute for People and the Environment (Imazon), an area the size of Alaska (1.5 million square kilometers) is under uncertain ownership: in other words, subject to some kind of private land claim that has yet to be endorsed or verified by the federal authorities.

A further one million square kilometers, although allegedly public, is subject to widespread illegal occupation, the report concluded.

As well as fuelling conflict, the chaotic land situation is widely seen as being one of the driving forces behind deforestation, and a major barrier to sustainable development of the Amazon region. No wonder, then, that a seemingly-obscure administrative battle over the bureaucratic machinery of issuing land titles has taken on a vital importance in the battle to save the world’s largest tropical forest.

According to Roberto Smeraldi, director of the Amazon Programme for Amigos da Terra (Friends of the Earth), the origins of the current chaos can be traced back to 1854 when Brazil introduced the land legislation still in force today. No mechanism was established then to bring public land – and that included virtually the entire Amazon – into the property of the federal union or national state. That created a situation somewhat akin to the “commons” of 16th and 17th century England that were appropriated through acts of enclosure by the great aristocratic estates.

“We have a kind of ‘nobody’s land’ that can be occupied and appropriated,” says Smeraldi. “Eventually the government or justice system will recognize your fait accompli and you will tend to become an owner. So speculation on land often becomes the main reason for expanding the frontier of colonization.”

In practice, the existing pattern of occupation in the Amazon arose from the policies of Brazil’s military government in the 1970s. In the name of national security, a network of highways was planned to bring some semblance of state presence into the vast “empty” green expanse, portrayed by the generals as a threat to Brazil’s sovereignty over its Northern territories and their resources.

In a policy known as “land without people for people without land”, incentives were given to poor farmers from Southern Brazil to move to the Amazon, especially in the area adjoining the eastern portion of the Trans-Amazonian Highway, the vast 5,300km project to link the Peruvian border to the West with Brazil’s Atlantic coastline.

So began a massive land-grab that has been analyzed in a new study by Imazon, carried out in conjunction with the World Bank, which has yet to be published but whose main findings were presented to a seminar in Brasilia last November, on the Amazon land situation and its potential solutions.

Two distinct types of settlers are identified in the study. The first, known as posseiros, which literally means occupiers in Portuguese, are those who lay claim to an area and obtain an official certificate showing that they have applied for title over the land. These applications have often remained pending for decades, and in the meantime the certificates are treated in practice as proof of ownership.

According to the co-author of the Imazon study, Brenda Brito, this type of land claim has had strong links with the process of deforestation. In the first place, it makes it cheaper to deforest new areas to expand agriculture and cattle ranching than to invest in improving productivity on already-cleared land. This is because the posseiros will normally never have paid anything to the government to occupy the land, other than a negligible rural land tax which is often paid to help give legitimacy to the claim.

Also, says Brito, deforestation has been seen as a means of improving the chances of gaining title over the land.

“By deforesting an area, the posseiro is sending a clear message that someone is already taking care of the land,” she says. “Unfortunately, during the 1980s this connection between deforestation and land occupation was even required by the land agency to issue land titles. In fact, to legalize a public land occupation, the posseiro had to ‘exploit’ the area, which was interpreted as deforesting it.

“Therefore, if the posseiros had deforested only a small part of the total area occupied, chances were that they would never get a land title.”

The second type of land claimant is known in Brazil as the grileiro,, a holder of fraudulently-obtained land titles, often issued by corrupt public notaries. The practice is so widespread that it has given rise to a well-understood word in the Brazilian-Portuguese dictionary, grilagem, referring specifically to this type of fraud.

Every so often, the workings of the system of grilagem are brought into public view. On January 13th this year, in an operation code-named “Wild West”, federal police and prosecutors swooped on a group of twelve people alleged to be collaborating to corruptly appropriate public land in the West of Pará state. They included officials from the federal land agency, lawyers, loggers and soy producers.

The combined impact of these types of land occupation – speculative with a view to obtaining title and downright fraudulent – has given rise to what Imazon describes as a “mosaic of conflict” in large parts of the Amazon. This refers to the patchwork of overlapping and often competing claims on the land arising from the legal ambiguities surrounding settlement in recent decades.

A common example of this is where ranchers assert ownership of forest land which has been occupied for generations by traditional groups such as fishing communities, rubber-tappers or subsistence farmers. Without the political influence to challenge the claims, these people find themselves being evicted from their homes and the victims of violence if they stand up to the powerful interests opposing them. It was just such a conflict that led to the assassination of rural union leader Chico Mendes 20 years ago at the hands of local ranchers in the state of Acre, making him Brazil’s foremost environmental martyr.

Overlapping claims have also arisen in areas where indigenous people assert traditional rights over ancestral lands. The process of recognizing those rights under law will normally take many years, and in the meantime if settlers have started to establish their own claims through productive activity, conflicts occur when the Indian lands are approved – the long-running saga of the Raposa Serra do Sol reserve in Roraima, extensively covered in these pages, is a classic case in point.

A final complication in the mosaic is that proposals for new protected areas (national parks etc) in the Amazon will often incorporate land subject to pending claims for title – and the question then arises as to whether the claimants should be compensated for abandoning their “property”. Different courts have reached different conclusions on this question.

With such enormous problems arising from the history of Amazon settlement, it is not surprising that the co-ordinator of the Lula government’s Sustainable Amazon Plan, the minster for Strategic Affairs Roberto Mangabeira Unger, has identified “land chaos” as the foremost problem to be solved if the region is to have a better future.

The efforts to tackle this problem have focused on clearing the massive backlog of claims for land title that have literally stacked up in regional offices of the agency responsible for assessing them, the National Institute for Colonization and Agrarian Reform (Incra). It is reckoned that some 300,000 claims are pending, and a recent government report leaked to the Brazilian press estimated that at the current rate of progress, it would take nearly 1,400 years to get through them.

According to Brenda Brito of Imazon, a key reason for this bottleneck is the dual role indicated by the agency’s name. As well as being responsible for issuing land titles, Incra is tasked with realizing the policy of land re-distribution to help reverse the chronic inequality of ownership in Brazilian society. In practice, this means establishing settlements for landless rural people on portions of large estates deemed “unproductive”, or on public land.

“Part of the difficulty in solving this backlog happens because Incra started to prioritize land reform rather than land titling as of 1985,” says Brito. “However at the same time, Incra never stopped receiving new requests for the latter. As a consequence, both old and new requests were pending decisions, as Incra was concentrating all its efforts in the creation of land settlements.”

Some have also pointed to a direct conflict of interest in this dual role, since the land reform settlements themselves are part of the mosaic of land use in the Amazon. This was brought into sharp relief last September, when the environment ministry’s policy to “name and shame” Brazil’s top 100 deforesters put Incra top of the list, because of the high rate of forest clearances in the areas surrounding the official settlements.

Doubts over Incra’s competence to deal with the problem led to a turf war between Mangabeira Unger’s department and the Agrarian Reform Ministry as to which bureaucrats should be given control of the process. After a meeting with President Lula at the end of January, Unger's proposal for a separate land titling agency was abandoned, but on February 12th, the government published legislation greatly streamlining the granting of title to occupiers of smaller estates in the Amazon.

Under the measure, to be presented shortly to Congress, permanent title for claims up to 1,500 hectares (3,700 acres), the vast majority, will be granted within two to four months, subject to certain conditions. The land must have been occupied lawfully and peacefully before December 2004, be under active cultivation, and the occupier cannot be a public servant or beneficiary of the land reform program.

Depending on the size of the property, claimants will be offered the land for free, or at reduced or market prices, and will be prevented from selling it within ten years. They will also be required to meet the current rule – widely flouted – that all properties in the Amazon should have at least 80 per cent of their area left as native vegetation.

Ahead of the publication of the measure, Minister Mangabeira Unger said, "The fog of confusion will be lifted. My aspiration is that we can regularize 80% of the land claims within three years.

“The big grileiros will be exposed to the full light of day, and these lands will be more susceptible to be re-taken by the federal government.”

Roberto Smeraldi of Amigos da Terra is much more pessimistic about the likely outcome of the proposed changes. He says the “regularization” of land claims is being proposed without the essential safeguard of making it clear that no new public lands will be put onto the market.

“I would say that this type of proposal will heat up land occupation in the Amazon. It will exacerbate conflicts and stimulate people to go out into marginal lands further from road access, in areas where you usually have more forest resources.

“The message that goes out is if you occupy land for long enough, it will pay some day.”

A version of this article was published by www.ecoamericas.com

No mincing words from Minc

The war of words (see last post) between the old and new regimes at Brazil's environment ministry (MMA) is turning ugly.

Having been accused by the former top official at the ministry, João Paulo Capobianco, of running an "excessively personalist" administration since he took over from Marina Silva in May last year, the present minister Carlos Minc got personal in return.

Speaking to the Estado de São Paulo where the original interview appeared,  Minc pointed out that even though Capobianco started out in the pressure group SOS Mata Atlântica, which fights to protect the what is left of Brazil's devastated Atlantic Forest, he had failed to give effect to new legislation criminalising destruction of the ecosystem - since rectified with a presidential decree late last year.

"He did not have dialogue either internally or externally, he didn't talk to Congress, nor to the productive sector," Minc said of Capobianco.

Minc also hit back at Capobianco's claim that the minister had failed to acknowledge a humiliating defeat for the environment with the agreement on a staged phase-in of low-sulphur diesel in Brazil. "Capobianco stayed five and a half years in the ministry and didn't manage to do anything to improve diesel," he said. "In seven months I got the deal. Now in the state capitals, buses and trucks are running on S-50 (50 parts per million of sulphur, as opposed to the current standard diesel content of 500ppm). And in 2012 we´ll lower the content to 10 parts per million. We're winning in stages."

As for the wider argument over the style of government and pushing the environmental agenda, Minc gave as good as he got from Capobianco.

"I'm doing exactly the opposite from Capobianco, who never discussed things with anyone. His intransigence ended up isolating minister Marina Silva. My administration works on dialogue. Inside the ministry, with the executive, with other areas of government and with the Congress."

Minc also criticised Minc's handling of the controversial breakup in 2007 of Brazil's federal environment agency Ibama, in which the old institution kept only its functions to enforce environmental legislation, while its former role of managing protected areas was given to a new body, the Instituto Chico Mendes - named after Brazil's foremost environmental martyr shot 20 years ago last month by ranchers in the Amazonian state of Acre.

At the time, the breakup was widely seen as a punishment by the government for delays in issuing environmental licenses, principally for big hydroelectric dams in the Amazon. Whatever administrative justification the new structure may have had (and there was a strong argument for reforming the previous cumbersome and under-resourced bureaucracy), the perception was of environmental defenders being emasculated in the government system, and a period of chaos followed the decision.

According to Minc, Capobianco "ended up creating a war between between Ibama and the Instituto Chico Mendes which we are only now sorting out. This war led to a five-month strike by Ibama."

The impression of a smooth transition following last year's resignation by Marina Silva - who has so far remained aloof from this squabble - is starting to look a little strained.

Copyright Tim Hirsch 2009. All Rights Reserved.

 

 

Outside the tent ...

The man who until May last year was Brazil's most senior environmental official has accused President Lula of lacking strategic vision on the environment.

João Paulo Capobianco left his post as executive secretary at the Ministry of the Environment (MMA) at the same time as the resignation of the charismatic environment minister Marina Silva, the former rubber-tapper's leader who had been appointed to the post by Lula when he first took office in 2002.

Capobianco, now visiting professor at Columbia University, used an interview with the leading newspaper Estado de São Paulo to criticise not just the president, but also the current environment minister Carlos Minc, accusing him of being "excessively personalist" in his administration.

As the official responsible for co-ordinating Brazil's environmental policy for six years, Capobianco was frank about its failures, especially on the question of deforestation in the Amazon. "I think we really failed to construct a more productive relationship with the economic sector - agriculture, trade, infrastructure, energy, etc," he told Estado.

"The environmental agenda cannot be the monopoly of one or other ministry - it needs to part of a vision of the State, and this vision does not exist. Is Lula sensitive to the environmental issue? Sure he is. But he does not have a strategic vision on the subject, he does not even consider it a strategic question."

Such comments are perhaps not surprising from a man who lived through constant battles with other government ministries over questions such as the licensing of hydro-electric dams, legalisation of genetically-modified soya and the special pleading of the powerful rural lobby in the Brazilian Congress. He is, after all, now "outside the tent" and free to voice the frustrations which, frankly, are felt in just about every environment ministry on the planet.

What is more unusual about the Brazilian system is that even those still inside the tent can at times be refreshingly frank about the internal struggles they face. This was Carlos Minc himself, speaking just before Christmas at a seminar on deforestation figures and quoted by the government news service Radiobras: "One ministry goes and opens up a road, another goes and builds a hydro-electric dam, and another expands the agricultural frontier. Then deforestation goes up and I'm the one who has to explain it."

Minc's undoubted dynamism and his willingness to fight the corner for the environment do not bring him much praise from Capobianco, however. In the Estado interview, he describes Minc as a friend with unquestioned commitment to the environmental agenda, but adds, "He is conducting an excessively and dangerously personalist administration. He wants in every way and at all times to give the impression that he's being a good minister and leading a good administration. This is really bad, because in truth the environmental issue is a complex one which inescapably involves conflicts."

Capobianco cites as an example the recent government decision to allow the state-run fuel supplier Petrobras a six-year phase-in period to introduce low-sulphur diesel. Minc's ministry portrayed the deal as a victory, but according to Capobianco, "It was a huge defeat for the construction of a responsible socio-environmental agenda for the country. Perhaps the biggest defeat of recent years, because it involves an environmental issue directly linked with public health and with well-recognised negative impacts."

Capobianco also criticises what he describes as Minc's "ecopragmatism" on the question of environmental licensing, mentioned in an earlier post - summarized by his phrase "dois pra lá, dois pra cá", two steps forward, two steps back. The former official says, "It doesn't work like that on environmental questions, because 'two steps back' can cause damage so serious that not even 'ten steps forward' can repair. The fact that you might receive more money to protect one cave does not minimise the loss of another. You might even lose that cave, but society needs to be clear about the consequences of that decision."

Copyright Tim Hirsch 2008. All rights reserved.

Putting the brakes on biofuels

The worldwide reaction against rapid expansion of biofuels has continued, with a proposal by the United Kingdom government to slow down the rate at which the country’s transport fuel must increase its renewable content. The announcement follows the publication of an official review which concluded that uncontrolled use of biofuels could drive changes in land use that may increase overall greenhouse gas emissions, as well as push food prices still higher.

While the review praised Brazilian ethanol as amongst the most efficient types of biofuel, it included a case study warning that carbon dioxide emissions from producing the fuel could increase by more than 60% if sugarcane is planted in place of native Cerrado vegetation.

The reverse in British biofuels policy was a response to a report on the indirect effects of biofuels production, carried out by the head of the government’s independent Renewable Fuels Agency, Professor Ed Gallagher. It did not argue for a moratorium on biofuels, as some European NGOs are now demanding, but did say current targets in Britain and the European Union for increasing mandatory biofuel use should be revised. It said continued increases in biofuels content beyond 2013 should only proceed if it could be conclusively proven that the environment and food supply were not being compromised, either directly or indirectly.

The British Transport Secretary, Ruth Kelly, responded immediately to the report by announcing a consultation to change the current “Renewable Transport Fuel Obligation”, which sets the minimum biofuels content that UK fuel suppliers must meet. The proposal is that instead of increasing the biofuel level to 5% by 2010/11, this target should be delayed until 2013/14.

The review was commissioned by the British government as a reaction to growing international concern about the sustainability of rapid biofuels expansion, including the potential impact on the Amazon rainforest and other Brazilian ecosystems. Among the indirect impacts feared are the added pressure from increased Brazilian soya production, as American farmers switch from soya to corn to produce ethanol, and the displacement of cattle to the Amazon basin as former pasture lands in other parts of Brazil are occupied by sugarcane plantations.

The Gallagher review says the issues surrounding these possible indirect impacts are highly complex, and require much more research before they can be accurately assessed. However, it notes (not specifically about Brazil), that “the balance of evidence shows a significant risk that current policies will lead to net greenhouse gas emissions and loss of biodiversity through habitat destruction.

“This includes effects arising from the conversion of grassland for cropland.”

The British review acknowledges that the efficiency of different biofuels production methods varies greatly in terms of their CO2 emission savings, with the Brazilian ethanol system scoring very highly, especially because the waste bagasse from sugarcane plants is used in many mills to produce renewable electricity.

However, one of a series of case studies commissioned for the review warns that this efficiency could be severely compromised if large-scale sugarcane expansion takes place on land currently occupied by native ecosystems, especially in the Cerrado.

The Brazilian case study, carried out by consultant Giúlio Volpi, formerly of WWF, is critical of the government agricultural research body EMBRAPA for claiming that 71 million hectares of the Cerrado is still available for agricultural expansion, without providing information either on the biodiversity status of this land, or on the potential loss of carbon that would take place if it were cultivated.

The report goes on to quote an unpublished study which estimates that conversion of Cerrado soils to sugarcane involves the loss of around 10% of their carbon – assuming the native vegetation contained 25 tonnes of carbon per hectare, this would lead to the emission of 237 grammes of carbon dioxide for each cubic metre of ethanol produced, an increase of 63% on the current average situation.

The case study accepts the argument that the negative impacts of biofuels expansion can be very much reduced if production is concentrated on the large areas of degraded cattle pasture available, especially in former Cerrado regions. Among its policy recommendations are increases in productivity of cattle production, “agro-ecological zoning” to control the location of new sugarcane plantations (due to be announced this month by the Brazilian government), and stricter enforcement of anti-deforestation laws.

In the British government report, Professor Gallagher makes it clear he believes biofuels can potentially still play a significant role in reducing global greenhouse gas emissions. However, his call for a slowdown, and its immediate acceptance by UK ministers, are further evidence of Europe’s growing doubts about the sustainability of what was once seen as a crucial weapon in the fight against climate change.

This article was published in Portuguese on www.oeco.com. Copyright O Eco, All Rights Reserved.

A month of Minc

A month after the sudden and dramatic resignation of Marina Silva as Brazil’s environment minister, it is still early days to assess the performance of her successor Carlos Minc, especially as he only formally took office nearly two weeks after her departure. But if anyone thought the new man would bide his time and ease himself gradually into the controversies that prompted Ms Silva’s exit, Minc has proven them dramatically wrong.

Responding to the unplanned change of environment ministers, President Lula insisted there would be no change in government policy on the environment. One month on, it does seem that the course steered by the Environment Ministry (MMA) remains roughly in the same direction. But a very different type of captain is at the helm.

Marina Silva, while adored and almost worshipped by the environmental movement, remained a somewhat aloof figure, giving few interviews to the media, and usually choosing to fight her many battles with government colleagues behind closed doors rather than in the public spotlight.

Minc has proven to be the very opposite, a down-to-earth Carioca reluctant to swap the beaches of Rio for the dry political landscapes of Brasilia – and not even waiting for his appointment to be officially confirmed before pronouncing in public on environmental licensing, deforestation and just about any other subject he could think of. And he has barely kept his mouth shut to the media ever since.

An early indication that Carlos Minc was not going to shy away from contoversy came in a very public war of words with the governor of Mato Grosso and soya magnate Blairo Maggi – Minc anticipated the publication of the figures for Amazon deforestation in April to warn the public that they would be bad, and that Mato Grosso would once again top the list of deforesting states. The response from Maggi was less than complimentary.

Minc also burst onto the scene with a string of new ideas, including that of a national “environmental force” to strengthen protection of Brazil’s forests and other ecosystems. He has since elaborated on that to propose a contingency force of firefighters and military police, both under control of the state governors, along the lines of the national security force set up after long negotiations to deal with emergencies, including last year’s upsurge of gang violence in Rio de Janeiro. In Brazil’s complex power play between the functions of state and federal authorities, Minc is walking into a potential minefield here, and he knows it.

Add to all this new, expanded targets for protected areas in the Amazon, and a stepping up of the “Arc of Fire” operation against illegal deforesters started during Marina Silva’s time in office, and Minc has left observers almost breathless trying to keep track of his latest statement or announcement.

What is still not clear, however, is how much of the frenetic activity of his opening weeks will result in solid measures to protect the environment, and what the changeover in ministers really means for the direction of government policy. For this reason, many of those in the NGO sector are understandably reluctant to commit themselves at this stage with an opinion on Minc’s performance so far.

Another reason is that the early signals about life under Minc can seem a little contradictory. For example, according to the director of environmental policy at Conservation International, Paulo Gustavo do Prado Pereira, among the positive signals to emerge from Minc’s brief tenure is his defence of the existing Forest Code, which stipulates that in the Amazon region, landowners must leave at least 80% of their property as natural vegetation – a rule which has come under strong attack from the rural lobby in Congress, generating speculation that it would soon be changed.

On the other hand, as the Instituto Socio-Ambiental (socio-environmental institute) points out, one of the first decisions Minc made in office was in effect a concession to the rural lobby in general and to Blairo Maggi in particular, despite the bad-tempered rhetoric the two men had exchanged in public. He clarified (or weakened, depending on your viewpoint) a key anti-deforestation measure to deny credit to landowners found to have infringed environmental regulations – stipulating that it applied only to areas officially considered within the Amazon forest biome, and excluding those areas in the transition zone between the Cerrado, or savanna, and the Amazon. The practical result of this measure will be to keep the lines of credit open to many farmers in Mato Grosso, whether or not they have been observing environmental laws.

Another area in which Minc’s tendencies are difficult to read is the question of environmental approval for major infrastructure projects, perhaps the biggest single issue that had got Marina Silva into trouble with government colleagues and created the frustration which led to her resignation. It was another subject on which he pronounced before he was even confirmed in the job, saying that rigor in the assessment made of the environmental impacts of a project should be combined with much less bureaucratic procedures and a speeding up of the approval process. This had been one of Minc’s priorities as state environment secretary of Rio de Janeiro, and something he has since followed up with the new directorate of the environment agency Ibama.

According to the campaigns director for SOS Mata Atlântica (Save the Atlantic Forest), Mario Mantovani, the setting of specific targets inside which environmental licences should be issued is the one negative point so far in Minc’s performance: “These are targets that can’t be met, because there are lots of bad projects out there – so he is taking a risk here,” says Mantovani.

On the other hand, according to Mantovani, Minc is a skilled negotiator and he is broadly optimistic that he will prove a good minister – but will face the same pressures from inside government that caused Marina Silva’s downfall.

“ Minc has one great merit: he’s been in the media since the day he arrived, drawing attention to environmental issues. Now he has to show what he is able to do in practice,” Mantovani adds.

Paulo Gustavo Pereira of Conservation International is also generally positive about Minc’s period of office, although he says it is too soon to say whether he is optimistic or pessimistic. He argues that Marina Silva’s policies on conservation will continue under Minc, with Lula’s support, because “Brazil fears damage to its image abroad, and consequent damage to its agricultural business, especially biofuels.”

Minc himself gave perhaps the best clue to his style of operating when he said, early on, that his strategy was a kind of political choreography, “Two steps forward, two steps back” (in Portuguese, Dois pra lá, dois pra cá) – for example for every two licences issued, create two new parks.

For some, this is risky pragmatism, for others a good strategy for getting things done within the limits of what is possible. Whichever way, the new man attempting to steer Brazil’s environmental policy through some very rough waters should give us all an intresting ride.


This article was written for the website www.oeco.com

Ethanol and the Invisible Ecosystem

Anyone who has been following closely the recent arguments about the ethanol boom and the expansion of sugarcane plantations in Brazil will be familiar with this map. Drawn up by the powerful sugar producers’ union of São Paulo state (UNICA), it is regularly used in presentations by supporters of the industry to demolish the claim that this biofuel is threatening the rainforest.

Pointing to the “sensitive biomes” of the Amazon and the Pantanal (the largest inland wetland on Earth), the map shows that the concentration of sugarcane production and ethanol plants is a safe distance from both. It is a compelling visual demonstration, until you ask the question: what is all that white space in the middle of the map?

The answer, it turns out, is the Cerrado, or Brazilian woodland-savanna. One of the world’s 34 biodiversity hotspots as defined by Conservation International (CI), it is home to 4,400 plant species that occur nowhere else in the world, 10 threatened endemic bird species, and a range of charismatic mammals including giant anteater, giant armadillo, jaguar and maned wolf. It has also, according to CI, lost nearly 80 per cent of its original vegetation, which is why it qualifies as a hotspot (the Amazon, which has only lost some 16%, does not).

Looked at this way, the map seems somewhat less than reassuring as a guarantee of the environmental sustainability of sugarcane and its current focus of expansion in Brazil. Which is why it was a surprising choice for inclusion in a report and presentation on the industry by the Brazilian affiliate of one of the world’s best-known wildlife organisations, WWF-Brasil.

The WWF report, sponsored by the Government of the Netherlands, originally set out to analyse the expansion of the Brazilian sugarcane sector in the context of the declining subsidies for sugar production in the European Union (EU). Made inevitable because of successful challenges in the World Trade Organisation (WTO) by Brazil and others, the gradual liberalization of the sugar trade regime will allow Brazilian sugar to compete more fairly on the world market, attracting higher prices without the distorting impact of EU subsidies.

As the study developed, however, the sugar issue was overshadowed by the extraordinary boom in ethanol production, with the Brazilian sugar-alcohol industry attracting massive international interest – both positive and negative – for its unrivalled technological experience and capacity to increase production in the era of astronomical oil prices and concern about fossil fuel impacts on global warming.

In its conclusions, presented at one of a series of debates on biofuels at the University of São Paulo, the WWF report shows a curious contrast between the “headline” judgements – overwhelmingly positive – and some of the detailed analysis, which points to the need for significant strengthening of existing safeguards to prevent environmental harm and threats to food security in particular regions.

On the big picture, the co-ordinator of WWF-Brasil’s agriculture and environment policy, and principal author of the report, Luiz Fernando Laranja da Fonseca, presented an analysis which differed little from that regularly set out by the Brazilian government and by the sugar-alcohol industry itself.

Essentially, the analysis attempts to shoot down two principal “myths” about biofuels expansion in Brazil prevalent in international circles, and particularly in Europe. First, that it threatens sensitive ecosystems like the Amazon (that map appears at this point on the Powerpoint presentation), and second that it contributes to the current world food supply crisis. On the second point, the argument used is that sugarcane occupies a small proportion of agricultural land, dwarfed by crops such as maize (corn) and soya (soybeans), and that there are vast tracts of degraded cattle pasture that provide more than enough spare capacity to expand both food and biofuels production.

The WWF report argues that at this “macro” level, the negative impacts of sugarcane expansion are low, and that there are significant benefits to the climate from using one of the world’s most energy-efficient forms of biofuels production – made even more efficient by the growing use of the woody crop waste known as bagasse to generate electricity.

When it comes to potential regional impacts, however, the report paints a very different picture, especially regarding the Cerrado. It cites another report published late last year by the Institute for Society, Population and Nature (ISPN), funded by the EU. This report suggested that some of the areas currently experiencing the most rapid growth in the planting of sugarcane were also those identified by Brazil’s federal environment ministry (MMA) as priority areas for conservation of the Cerrado ecosystem.

Source: ISPN, from MMA and INPE

For example, in this map showing part of the state of Goiás to the west of the federal capital Brasilia, the purple areas of sugar cane plantations and red production plants are shown to coincide with the beige shaded areas defined by the government itself as “very high priority” areas for conservation of the Cerrado.

Even in the areas of São Paulo state where sugarcane already dominates the landscape, both the ISPN report and the current WWF study warn that further expansion of the crop could have damaging impacts on water resources and on biodiversity. For example, the region around the city of Riberão Preto – the Dallas of Brazil’s ethanol rush – some 45% of the land surface is already covered by sugarcane. Further expansion, argues WWF, should be accompanied by better strategic planning and accompanied by measures such as new protected areas to safeguard what remains of the natural resources of the area.

On the question of food security, the report also cautions that at the local level, there is a risk that small-scale agriculture, which produces the great majority of Brazil’s food supply, could give way to large-scale ethanol production, and that farmers displaced from their lands could be driven to peripheral urban areas with all the social consequences that brings.

The WWF study also acknowledges that while the direct impact on the Amazon from sugarcane production is minimal – although a small amount is grown in the region – there is a risk of indirect impacts if the displacement of cattle production and other crops in the Centre-South region by sugarcane pushes those activities to the rainforest frontier. However, it does not come to a firm conclusion on this, arguing instead that methodologies should be developed to measure these indirect impacts.

So lurking beneath the generally positive outlook on ethanol expansion given in this WWF analysis lie some pretty severe points of caution. Perhaps one of the key messages is that if the industry and its supporters really want to put a convincing case for the sustainability of this booming biofuel, the Cerrado should cease to be an invisible white gap on the map, and acknowledged as a valuable ecosystem worthy of care and attention in the planning of energy and food production in Brazil.

This article was published on www.oeco.com.br

The passing of Marina

The sudden resignation of Brazil’s environment minister Marina Silva this week left the government of President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva badly wrong-footed. Lula himself faced the embarrassment of having to respond to the announcement during a press conference with the visiting German chancellor Angela Merkel, and the process of naming a successor was messy and confused, with the result that the new environment minister Carlos Minc appeared to be the president’s second choice.

The prominent coverage given to the resignation, not just in Brazil but around the world, is testament to the influence and respect Marina Silva has earned during her period in office. Yet in a sense, the real surprise was not that she left the government, but that she remained inside it for so long.

At one level, Silva has been at the core of Lula’s administration. Their political association goes back more than thirty years, and when the new president took office in 2003, hers was one of the first ministerial appointments to be announced. It was a highly symbolic choice -- the charismatic leader of the rubber-tappers association from the remote Amazonian state of Acre, and former close associate of the assassinated activist and environmental martyr Chico Mendes. For the green movement, it seemed a dream come true. A child of the struggle against destruction of the rainforest was now in charge of government policies to protect it.

What was more, Marina Silva took with her into the environment ministry (Ministério do Meio Ambiente, or MMA) a group of advisers drawn from green NGOs, including a former director of Greenpeace in Brazil. On the sidelines for so long, Brazilian environmentalists now even seemed to have their own headquarters in the heart of power, one of the brutalist 1960s blocks that house the ministries marching up Brasilia’s esplanade towards the presidential palace, the Planalto.

It did not take long, however, for tensions to emerge between Silva and other members of the Lula administration. Despite his obvious affection and respect for Silva and the struggle she represents, Lula is anything but green. The former metalworkers’ union leader takes what might be termed an old-Left view of development – progress for him and the majority of his colleagues is grounded in industry, jobs and infrastructure. If trees and rivers get in the way of roads and dams, the “tree-huggers” are cast as the enemies of development.

So Marina Silva’s MMA has been in a constant series of battles with other, more powerful ministries such as Mines and Energy, and Agriculture. From the start, the ambitious multi-ministerial plan to combat deforestation in the Amazon has been caught in the contradiction of government incentives for an expanding export-based agricultural commodities sector, and a programme of roadbuilding and new hydro-electric dams in the region.

At times, Silva has had to ride out public and somewhat humiliating defeats, for example in the government decision to accept the legalization of commercial growing of genetically-modified crops. This was one of several points at which she was widely expected to resign – but she took the view that it was better to fight battles inside government so long as she could still have a significant influence.

Equally, Marina Silva was frequently among the names listed by the media as likely casualties of government reshuffles, most notably when Lula began his second four-year term at the beginning of 2007. The complaints against her ministry were growing louder from industrial lobbies that saw the environmental licensing system as a major constraint holding back big developments – a serious charge from the point of view of a president grounding his second mandate on a “Programme of Accelerated Growth” in which environmental concerns are often portrayed as an inconvenient handicap.

Yet Lula kept his environment minister on, probably because in the end it was better for him to have her there than outside the government, despite the complaints. It brings to mind the words of the late US President Lyndon Johnson with regard to the FBI chief J Edgar Hoover – “I’d rather have him inside the tent spitting out than outside the tent spitting in.” Actually he did not use the word “spitting”.

So long as Marina Silva was inside the government tent, criticism of the Lula administration’s environmental policy was always going to be muted, because green groups felt they had a powerful ally with unquestioned integrity doing her best to fight their battles from within. Lula knew this, and even if her presence could be inconvenient at times, it was a price well worth paying if she could deflect the full force of that criticism, especially on the international scene where she commanded such obvious respect.

In recent months, however, Silva’s position looked increasingly uncomfortable as Lula seemed at times to be undermining her position in public. This was clearly the case following the publication in January of the alarming satellite data indicating a sharp upturn in Amazon deforestation in the final months of 2007. While Marina Silva headed the press conference announcing the figures and blamed the expansion of cattle and soya production, Lula appeared to side with his political ally Blairo Maggi, governor of the state of Mato Grosso and big-time soya producer. Maggi accused the government space research institute INPE of lying about the data – and while Lula did not go that far, he did attack critics for jumping to conclusions about the figures, and called on NGOs to “go back and plant trees in their own countries.”

Even though the government has announced significant action this year to act against deforestation, Marina Silva has seemed increasingly marginalized. This was painfully the case last week when she was passed over for overall control of the government’s Sustainable Amazon Programme – with the coordination instead being given to the minister of strategic affairs Mangabeira Unger. Significantly, this programme puts the fight against illegal deforestation and protection of biodiversity behind guaranteeing national sovereignty and territorial integrity in its list of priorities.

With her departure, Marina Silva could make president Lula’s life very difficult, if she so chose. With a platform in the Senate, and a formidable reputation both inside Brazil and abroad, any direct criticisms she makes will be widely heard and respected. And from now on, the environmental movement will not pull any punches.

In fact, her first public statements following her resignation were measured and fell short of open criticism, speaking only of a sense of “stagnation” in her ability to influence things, and wishing well to her successor. But in a sense, she did not need to attack government policy, since the very act of her resignation had been so widely interpreted as a blow to the credibility of Lula’s environmental policies.

The new minister Carlos Minc, until now environment secretary for the state of Rio de Janeiro, has fine credentials as far as the green movement is concerned – he was, for example, among the founders of the Green Party in Brazil. However, he suffers from one major disadvantage. He is not, and never will be, Marina Silva.

This article was first published in O Eco.