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Greenpiece: Brazil’s Prez elections key to climate policies in coming years
The incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, is guilty of unprecedented destruction of the one of the world’s great carbon sinks — the Amazon Rainforest. With the narrow victory of Lula da Silva, hope for recovery brightens.
The Conference of Parties 27 (COP27) in Egypt kicked off on Sunday. Yet, in far-away Brazil, presidential elections are also key to how the world will experience climate change impacts.
The incumbent, Jair Bolsonaro, is guilty of unprecedented destruction of the one of the world’s great carbon sinks — the Amazon Rainforest. With the narrow victory of Lula da Silva, hope for recovery brightens.
But Bolsanaro won handsomely in the very parts of the Amazon charred for mining and other projects. Evidently, many voters support the end of the Amazon. How will the new government, with a slender mandate, roll this back?
Equally, the revival of the Amazon poses the question of what sovereign means in this climate emergency.
Global, especially Western influencers have been loudly hoping for Bosonaro to lose. As more iconic carbon sinks come under pressure, will global calls to conserve them be shriller?
I think so, because in their protection lies everyone’s better future. In an inter-connected world, killing off such naturescapes won’t just cause international denouncement; we are at such a precarious stage, it might result in global action. In effect, a country might not be able to exercise sovereign rights over key ecosystems if it fails to conserve them. Each country should expect that its carbon sinks will come under aggressive global scrutiny if not conserved. We once called this interference, but need a new term for green actions that could happen next.
(The writer is the founder and director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Group.)
