(Bloomberg Opinion) -- Women, homosexuals, northeasteners—scientists. The list of constituencies slighted by Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro has just grown longer.
His latest target: The National Institute for Space Research, known as INPE, which recently warned that forest destruction in the Amazon basin had spiked. Bolsonaro cast doubt on satellite images pointing to a 68% increase in rain-forest felling in the first two weeks of July compared to the same period a year ago, essentially dismissing the numbers as fake science, and suggested that INPE director Ricardo Galvao was in league with nongovernmental organizations.
Galvao hit back, slamming Bolsonaro for tarring Brazilian science and comparing his statements to “the joke of a 14-year-old unbefitting a president.” That’s hardly surprising for Brazil’s offender-in-chief, whose partisan homies delight in his every off-color quip and ad hominem assault. Yet by dissing INPE, Bolsonaro inadvertently shone a welcome spotlight on the country’s signature geographical research academy, and by extension the entire Brazilian scientific community toiling to rescue the Amazon.
Brazil, perhaps justifiably, is known for its heavy environmental footprint, starting with the razing of the world’s largest tropical rain forest. What’s less visible and remains mostly unsung is the country’s prowess in tracking forest destruction and converting the data into crucial policy tools for conservation and environmental law keeping.
Over the last three decades, Brazil has become the benchmark for monitoring land-use change. Culling images captured by international satellites, teams of analysts at INPE produce daily alerts of hot spots (flagging real-time slash-and-burn farming, for example) in the rain forest. A separate program plots change in forest cover by comparing snapshots every 15 to 20 days, the time it takes for the orbiting satellite to return to the same position.
That data is uploaded to the internet and sent to federal and regional environmental authorities, who crosscheck with rural property maps. In this way, officials can see who is cutting down forests, determine if the felling is illegal and dispatch inspectors or environmental police to trouble spots. Anyone can access the database and so hold authorities to account. Some 95% of the system’s early warnings flag actual forest destruction, former national forest service director Tasso Azevedo told me.
INPE’s monitoring tools helped Brazil generate the first comprehensive deforestation maps in the tropics. Its stream of images and forest cover maps feeds geographical data bases and has inspired at least 10 other climate research initiatives across the globe, from Japan’s Forest Early Warning System in the Tropics to the University of Maryland’s Global Land Analysis and Discovery laboratory.
“Other countries have adopted pieces of the Brazilian program, but no one has a system as complete,” said Azevedo, who now coordinates the climate change think tank Mapbiomas. “That’s turned Brazil into one of the most monitored ecosystems in the world.”
One of the ironies of the Bolsonaro imbroglio is that INPE helped boot up a new generation of earth-monitoring tools, enhanced by cheaper and more powerful satellites, by which scientists and citizens can easily cross-check their findings and eliminate false positives. “In the days of multiple remote sensing monitoring systems, the INPE conclusion will be easily confirmed by independent sources,” longtime Amazon scholar Tom Lovejoy, senior fellow at the United Nations Foundation, told me.
Think tanks such as Mapbiomas and the Amazon Institute of People and the Environment (Imazon) leverage and then refine INPE data to zoom in on Amazonian hot spots, issuing regular bulletins for local government and civic groups. Azevedo is bringing Brazil’s forest monitoring tools to Indonesia, Argentina and Paraguay.
Contrary to the partisan cant in Brasilia, this arrangement was not the work of tree-huggers or academics. Rather, it dates to the days of military government, when the ruling generals saw occupying the Amazon basin and its trove of gold, iron ore, timber and arable soils as a keystone to Brazilian manifest destiny. So as farmers, ranchers, miners and road-builders pushed deeper into the South American tropical frontier, scientists were close on their heel and tracking their progress through images captured from orbiting satellites.
Another irony for a government with a soft spot for all things military: the armed forces’ frontier zeal gave rise to the defense ministry’s own satellite monitoring program, which has consistently confirmed INPE’s findings of rising deforestation.
The forest watch grew more urgent in the late 1980s and 1990s, as the rush to the Amazon frontier brought havoc and lawlessness and collided with the rising global green agenda. Even as Brazilians trampled the rain forest, the scientists refined their watch. Crunching INPE’s numbers, rain-forest watchdogs can now pinpoint destruction on patches no larger than half a football pitch.
Such precision helped the authorities flag and catch violators. And better policing, along with protecting indigenous lands, expanding nature preserves and binding soy farmers to promises not to clear cut forest to sow their fields, contributed to Brazil’s sharp reduction in deforestation from 2004 to 2012.
The historic decline allowed Brazil to briefly shed its reputation of environmental villain by beating its international commitment to reduce carbon emissions by 2020. Yet suddenly, under Bolsonaro, to whom such safeguards and science are speed bumps to progress, those gains are now in jeopardy.
The problem is not just obscurantism, but the self-harm that science denial can inflict on Brazil and beyond. “Studies show that the Amazon forest stores more carbon than the world’s reserves of fossil fuels,” Imazon senior researcher Adalberto Verissimo told me. “If we drop our guard and allow the rain forest carbon to empty into the atmosphere, the whole planet pays the price, including Brazil.”
There’s still time for Brazil to swerve from danger. Professionals in Brasilia convinced Bolsonaro to drop his campaign cant against China, so preserving relations with the country’s largest trade partner, and dissuaded foreign policy ideologues from ditching Brazil’s commitments to global governance. Reformers in congress salvaged pension reform from government dithering. So, too, cooler heads can still prevail in the Amazon by promoting good environmental stewardship.
“Brazil has shown it can produce soybeans, iron ore and sugar cane for ethanol and still control deforestation and keep carbon emissions low,” Verissimo said. “Markets want goods that don’t trash the environment.” Look no further than the newly inked agreement between the South American common market Mercosur and the European Union, which commits Brazil to containing deforestation.
Brazil needs science to show how to conserve the environment, not to look the other way.
To contact the editor responsible for this story: James Gibney at jgibney5@bloomberg.net
This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.
Mac Margolis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering Latin and South America. He was a reporter for Newsweek and is the author of “The Last New World: The Conquest of the Amazon Frontier.”
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