Natural Environment Blog

Environmentalists have concerns over Brazil’s recently announced plan to save the Amazon rainforest. 

The plan, unveiled by the government on Monday, would result in a 72 percent decrease in deforestation by 2017. 

But environmental groups, while commending the government for finally taking action, believe the plan doesn’t go far enough.

Greenpeace Brazil’s View

Greenpeace doesn’t appear to be impressed with Brazil’s deforestation plan. Greenpeace maintains that deforestation of the Amazon needs to be completely eliminated - not just reduced.

Sergio Leitao, Greenpeace director of public politics in Brazil says “In adopting timid targets the government is showing that it is going in the right direction, but at the wrong speed, because the problem requires urgent solutions”

Leitao also suggests that Brazil is using its reliance on funding from rich nations as a convenient escape clause.

“By connecting the reduction of deforestation to obtaining international resources, in a moment of economic crisis, the government has an argument ready for not achieving targets in the future,” he said.  

Greepeace UK’s View

And Greepeace UK has said on its blog:

On the surface, this might sound ambitious and visionary but of course even if these targets are met, they’ll reduce deforestation but they won’t stop it.

Greenpeace UK highlights the fact that Brazil’s government seems happy to lose rainforest:

As environment minister Carlos Minc noted, if all goes to plan then in 2017 we’ll still be losing 5,000 sq km of rainforest every year (although I think he saw that as a good thing)

And, importantly, Greepeace points out that the deforestation plan only appears to be applicable to illegal deforestation.

Therefore, legal clearance of the rainforest will be unaffected. This means that a new bill soon to be voted on in Brazil’s parlaiment would effectively undermine the new plan. The bill, if passed, would allow land owners to clear as much as 50% of their forests (currently, they’re allowed to clear 20%).

On this point, Greenpeace comments:

So right there you can see that, even if illegal deforestation is cut or even eliminated, state sanctioned destruction could balloon in its place and so completely undermine any efforts to bring the rate of deforestation down.

WWF Brazil’s View 

In the meantime, WWF-Brazil has labeled the plan as “commendable but short on ambition and detail“.

However, Carlos Alberto de Mattos Scaramuzza, Conservation Director at WWF-Brazil still agrees that it is “reasonably” ambitious:

“This goal is reasonably ambitious,” he says. “To achieve it, next year deforestation will have to drop 23% in relation to this year.”

But he wants to see a plan that’s more than “reasonably ambitous”.

Instead, WWF-Brazil wants to see a goal of zero deforestation by 2015.

“This goal is achievable if key actors—ranging from indigenous peoples to ranchers—are compensated for conserving the forest and thereby avoiding deforestation” Scaramuzza says.

And WWF-Brazil’s CEO Denise Hamú agrees.

“This fund appears to be geared primarily to supporting government command-and-control programmes,” she says

“To achieve more ambitious reductions in deforestation, it will be effective mechanisms to compensate the key actors on the ground who determine the fate of the forest.”

The Brazilian government has announced plans to slash deforestation in the Amazon region by 72 percent by 2017.

The announcement, made by Environment Minister Carlos Minc in Brasilia on Monday, comes three days after it was revealed that deforestation in the Amazon had increased in 2008 for the first time in 4 years. 

Part of the plan includes adding 3,000 more officers to fight illegal logging in the Amazon.

“This plan improves Brazil’s image, we’ll have more moral authority internationally,” Minc told reporters after announcing the plan.

The 72 percent figure comes from comparing against an annual deforestation average between 1996 and 2005. Minc says the plan would reduce deforestation by 72% when compared with the 7,330 square miles lost on average each year during that period.

Reduced Carbon Emissions

Brazil’s announcement came as this year’s United Nations Climate Change Conference commenced in Poznań, Poland. 

Brazilian President Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva believes that the plan puts Brazil ahead of many other countries attending the conference.

“We will surely receive criticism, but we can say that we are presenting a better one than China or India, and better than others that still haven’t signed the Kyoto Protocol,” he said.

Minc shares the president’s view ”Just in terms of avoided deforestation in the Amazon, the plan foresees a reduction of 4.8 billion tons of carbon dioxide that won’t be emitted up to 2018, which is more than the reduction efforts fixed by all the rich countries,” he explained.

Reforestation

Brazil not only plans to reduce deforestation, but also plans to double the reforested areas to 11 million hectares by 2020.

“This means that by 2015 we will be planting more trees than cutting,” Minc said.

Brazil’s Forestry Service Welcomes the Plan

The Brazilian government’s forestry service welcomes the announcement.

“We can now adopt targets because we now have the instruments to implement them” said Tasso Azevedo, head of the forestry service.

The ‘instruments’ Azevedo refers to is the new Amazon fund established earlier this year.

The Amazon Fund

The Amazon Fund is a fund established to preserve millions of acres of the Amazon as quickly as possible. 

Through the fund, Brazil hopes to attract $21 billion in donations from rich countries to protect the Amazon.

Norway has already made a pledge of up to $1 billion to the fund. Norway’s contribution will be made by installments, each one being made on the condition that deforestation had reduced during the previous year.

Destruction of the Brazillian Amazon rainforest has accelerated over the 2007/2008 period, according to The National Institute For Space Research (INPE).

Satellite images by the Institute reveals that 4,633 square miles (12,000 square kilometers) of rainforest was destroyed from August 2007 through July 2008. That’s an area roughly the size of the state of Connecticut in the United States. 

This is an increase from the 2006/2007 figure of 4,332 square miles (11,224 square kilometers).

As dissapointing as the increase is, it is still well below the record figure of 10,570 square miles (27,379 square kilomters) recorded in 2004. 

Positive Outlook for the Future

Environment Minister Carlos Minc says that, although he is not happy with the 2008 figure, he is sure it would have been much worse without government policies aimed at tackling illegal logging.

“Many had expected an increase of 30-40 percent and we managed to stabilize it,” he said.

“When you confiscate soy and beef it hurts them in the pocket,” he continued.

Mr Minc is referring to confiscated farm products from illegally cleared land as well as cut financing for unregistered properties.

“Today’s figures are unacceptable but the long-term trend remains positive and they show that it is possible to do something about deforestation,” said Paulo Moutinho, coordinator at the Amazon Research Institute.

More Needs to be Done

Moutinho also believes that more needs to be done to discourage deforestation.

“We need to make it more expensive to cut a tree than to preserve it” he said.

This is a sentiment shared by Prince Charles, who launched his Prince’s Rainforest Project last year in order to make rainforests more valuable alive than dead.

Prince Charles has said “It seems to me that the central issue in this whole debate is how we put a true value on standing rainforests to the world community”.

One way of doing this, according to Canopy Capital, is to place a price on the services that rainforests provide to the wider community.

Officially recognized as a new species, this lizard could almost pass for a snake. Photo: Agustin Camacho

A legless lizard discovered earlier this year in Brazil’s Cerrado grasslands has been given a scientific name, officially making it a new species.

The scientific name, Bachia oxyrhina, is derived from the Latin oxy (sharp) and rhinos (nose).

The lizard was recently described for the first time, in a study published in September by the scientific journal Zootaxa.

To an untrained eye, the lizard could easily pass for a snake. It’s very long and thin, and doesn’t appear to have any legs.

However, although it appears legless, the lizard does have small limbs. It’s just that, they don’t really do much. As a result, the lizard moves about by slithering like a snake. 

Apart from having legs (albiet, undeveloped), there are other factors that differentiate ”legless” lizards from snakes. One factor is the lack of extreme modifications in cranial morphology that enables snakes to ingest large prey. 

In fact, all you’re likely to see this legless lizard munching on is small bugs, termites and ants.

Recognition Happened Very Quickly 

The name Bachia oxyrhina was named after the lizard's sharp nose. Photo: Agustin Camacho

Given the species was only discovered in January this year, the recognition of the lizard as a new species has happened relatively quickly. The process of recognition for new species often takes many years. This depends on the accumulation of basic of scientific knowledge about the group to which it belongs.

“Recent research with lizards of the same genus, together with the large amount of data collected on the diversity of lizards living in the Cerrado and the experience of the team of herpetologists (zoologists who study reptiles and amphibians) involved in this project, contributed to the quickness of the recognition process,” said Miguel Trefaut Rodrigues Leading Brazilian zoologist from the Universidade de São Paulo, and first author of the description of the lizard.

13 Suspected New Species

The lizard is one of 13 suspected new species that were found during an expedition to Cerrado in Brazil. Out of the 13, this is the first species to be officially identified.

“It’s very exciting to find new species and data on the richness, abundance, and distribution of wildlife in one of the most extensive, complex, and unknown regions of the Cerrado,” said the expedition leader  CI biologist Cristiano Nogueira at the time of the expedition.

The wooded grassland once covered an area half the size of Europe, but is now being converted to cropland and ranchland at twice the rate of the neighboring Amazon rainforest, resulting in the loss of native vegetation and unique species.