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The Amazon rainforest is facing a new threat: politics. Brazilian laws that protect the world’s largest rainforest are threatened by the country’s continuing political turmoil following the impeachment of former president Dilma Rousseff.

The so-called “ruralista” bloc in the National Congress of Brazil, which represents the interests of agribusinesses and large landholders, has been using the chaos in the political system as a cover to push through legislation to reverse longstanding protections for the rainforest, says Phillip Fearnside, an ecologist with the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) in Manaus.

These initiatives include a move to open portions of conservation areas in Para state to mining and agricultural activities.

The government of Rousseff’s successor, Michel Temer, is also fast-tracking major development projects that will lead to further deforestation, including hydroelectric dams and highways. For example, the proposed Cuiaba-Santarem road would “cut Amazon in the middle with a lot of additional deforestation”, says Adalberto Luis Val, also at INPA.

Fearnside worries about legislation that would eliminate Brazil’s longstanding environmental licensing process. He says that constitutional amendment 65, which is being considered by Congress, “would force government agencies to rubber stamp all infrastructure projects, regardless of their potential impact on the environment”. A three-fifths majority would be needed to pass this amendment.

Deforestation rise

Following about a decade of stability, the last three years have seen rising deforestation again. Last year saw a 29 per cent rise in Amazon deforestation over the previous year, which Fearnside in part blames on increases in the global price for soy and beef, the two main commodities grown on cleared rainforest lands.

The current administration is also playing a role. Paulo Artaxo, a climatologist at the Brazilian Academy of Sciences, says that 43 per cent cuts in Brazil’s Ministry of Environment budget and 44 per cent cuts in its science research budgets, which were recently finalised, will cripple efforts to combat deforestation.

“The necessary enforcement [of environmental laws] in Amazonia is being reduced to virtually zero,” says Artaxo. “Even the fire prevention department will have no vehicles or funds to fight fires.”

That is a worry because Artaxo says they expect big fires this year due to dry conditions. Climate change is transforming rainfall patterns in the southern Amazon, which has experienced massive forest fires during recent dry years.

These destructive trends have been somewhat offset by the notable success of indigenous peoples in Brazil in protecting their own lands. A study reported that deforestation rates in reserves under tribal control in Brazil were less than one tenth of the losses seen in other forest areas.

But the ability of indigenous Brazilians to safeguard their land is being challenged by “a whole raft of constitutional amendments and draft laws”, says Sarah Dee Shenker of the UK- based nonprofit Survival International.

Loss of safeguards

This week, an estimated 3000 indigenous people from Brazil’s Amazon region will join an encampment in the capital Brasilia to protest funding cuts to the Brazilian government body that oversees policies relating to indigenous people, called FUNAI. They also oppose regulatory threats like the bill PEC 215, which would give Congress the power to indefinitely put off the demarcation and protection of their territories and prevent any further expansion of them.

“Indigenous people across the country are outraged at the failure to safeguard their land, without which they cannot survive,” says Shenker.

The Brazilian government under former president Rousseff pledged a “zero deforestation” policy, which was part of its commitment to the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 2°C. While the Temer government hasn’t yet formally reneged on these pledges, it is moving in the opposite direction in the name of economic development, says Christiane Mazzetti of Greenpeace Brazil.

But protecting the Amazon rainforest isn’t incompatible with realising Brazil’s economic aspirations, says forest ecologist Daniel Nepstad, at the Earth Innovation Institute in the US.

“There is huge potential for Brazil to achieve both its agricultural output goals and its conservation goals,” says Nepstad.

But he adds that this is only possible if a new spirit of pragmatic cooperation between Brazil’s farmers and the science, indigenous and environmental communities arises in a country where – at the moment – the political polarisation is only getting worse.