In Brazil, voters help decide the future of the planet. Scientists say: If President Bolsonaro stays, it would be catastrophic for the Amazon rainforest. If his challenger wins, there is more hope for the green lung.
Hundreds of meters above the Amazon rainforest, it is cool and dry. In the early morning we climb 325 meters to the highest research tower on earth. Dense fog still lies over the treetops, which extend all around like a green ocean. He can be observed at work from the Amazon Tall Tower Observatory; the system, the green lungs, the air conditioning, as you can call the Amazon rainforest when it comes to the global climate.
Also on this day in February the sun will evaporate up to 20 billion tons of water from the forest; That's more than the Amazon River carries at one time. Huge clouds carry the water up to hundreds of kilometers and provide almost the entire South American continent with rain. Scientists therefore call them flying rivers. Rivers that could change dramatically. And the climate at the same time. The Brazilians will also decide on this Sunday when they go to the runoff election for the presidency.
One candidate, President Jair Bolsonaro, thinks very little of environmental protection. Under him, the Amazon rainforest shrank dramatically. The other, adversary Lula Inácio da Silva, was head of state before and wants to return to the Palácio do Planalto, the palace of the plateau in the capital Brasilia. Between 2003 and 2012, Lula reduced deforestation very significantly - and now wants to stop it as much as possible. Perhaps never before has an election in the Global South been so important to the entire planet.
As long as the sun's energy shines on the forest and lets the water evaporate there, the energy doesn't turn into heat, explains Stefan Wolff from the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry while looking out over the green sea from the tower. Since the clouds also cool the earth, researchers call the Amazon not only the green lung, but also the air conditioner of the world. Without the rainforest, it would probably be around 2 degrees warmer in Brazil alone. The Paris climate targets would hardly be achievable.
"Another four years like the last four would be a catastrophe for the Amazon," says Stefan Wolff over the phone, shortly before the presidential election and several months after the conversation on the observation tower. The Amazon rainforest is already close to a so-called tipping point. A point at which the forest can no longer recover from the destruction.
Around 20 percent of the original rainforest has already been destroyed. Scientists assume that 25 percent would be the end of the Amazon system. In order to save the earth's air conditioning, the remaining part would have to be protected and destroyed areas would have to be reforested. But now the opposite is happening.
As soon as Bolsonaro was in office at the beginning of 2018, he rolled up his sleeves in the Amazon: He announced that he wanted to develop the rainforest areas economically, cut the funds for the INPE and the environmental protection institute IBAMA. Deforestation has increased significantly since then. Satellite data from the Brazilian space institute INPE shows that in the first three years of his tenure, 33,200 square kilometers of forest were destroyed, an area larger than Belgium. Last year, deforestation reached its highest level since 2006.
If the environmental laws are violated, IBAMA imposes penalties and enforces both with its own armed forces - actually. Bolsonaro called fines "ideological" and told then-environment minister Ricardo Salles to "lay the ax on these people at IBAMA. I don't want believers." The minister fired most of the regional leaders and replaced them with loyalists, such as the military. Other regional departments remained leaderless. Deforestation increased and penalties fell to their lowest level in decades. Gold diggers and loggers felt encouraged by the laissez-faire policy and proceeded without much ado.
The government's response to an outbreak of violence three years ago in the southern Amazon is exemplary of the government's position. At the beginning of July 2019, IBAMA on the border between the states of Rondônia and Mato Grosso wanted to prevent loggers from continuing to clear illegally in the indigenous protected areas there. So emergency services arrived in Boa Vista do Paracana, including three helicopters and a tanker truck. The loggers fought back. To protect their illegal business, they set fire to a bridge and blocked access roads with logs. Then they set the tanker on fire. IBAMA withdrew.
No help came from the higher-level Ministry of the Environment, on the contrary. Two weeks after the events, department head Salles traveled to the site, spoke to the lumberjacks - and praised them as representative of the "good workers in the country". His visit is a sign of respect. "The laws have nothing to do with reality. What we are doing right now is bringing the legal part into line with the real world across the country," he told the applauding workers.
Two years later, Salles had to go - but not because he had touted behind closed doors during the pandemic that global media attention to the corona virus was a great opportunity to change "all the rules" of environmental protection measures for the rainforest and "the herd of cattle" unnoticed drifting through the Amazon". But because he had tried to prevent investigations into the export of illegally felled tropical timber to Europe and the USA.
A large part of this illegally cleared land is used for animal husbandry and soybean cultivation. Brazil is the second largest beef producer and the largest soybean producer in the world.
Stefan Wolff has been working in the Amazon since 2010. The research tower is a joint project of two German Max Planck Institutes and the Brazilian Institute for Amazon Research (INPA). Thanks to the enormous height, the researchers can take air samples here that are representative of the entire Amazon basin. The scientists observe the changes because the vegetation is different. "A small soybean plant cannot evaporate as much water as a tree," explains Wolff. The soil in a soybean field warms up more, and the downwind areas of the forest receive less water.
The more the Amazon is deforested, the more sensitive it becomes. The forest cannot survive if it is dismembered into individual parts, the system only functions as an overall construct. Without the flying rivers, large parts of South America would dry up and become deserts or semi-deserts. Such as those found at similar latitudes in Australia or Africa.
Bolsonaro barely touched on environmental issues during the election campaign. Instead, he focused on crime, corruption and the state of the economy. It didn't harm him or other conservative forces, on the contrary. They will be even more strongly represented in the future congress. Bolsonaro's party, for example, won significantly in four of the nine Amazon states. The powerful agricultural lobby, whose support Bolsonaro can be sure of, greets from there. Ex-Environment Minister Salles will also be a member of Congress in the future. Hardly anyone got more votes than him.
In Lula's first presidency from 2003 to 2010, deforestation had decreased by around 72 percent. In the current election campaign, he announced that as head of state he would lead a "relentless fight" against deforestation. During a televised duel with Bolsonaro, he said he wanted to reissue a forest protection law, plant cleared areas and bring the deforestation rate to "net zero".
If he implemented all of this, deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon could be reduced by 89 percent by 2030, according to analysis by INPE and Oxford University. That's unlikely to happen, however: if Lula wins, he'll need congressional approval for tougher environmental laws. So he will have to make concessions. That would still not be bad news for the rainforest. Nor for the global climate.
