Hello. Hey, this sounds nice. Oh doesn't it! It's from northern Brazil in the Amazon. It's a good place to start The Climate
Question from the BBCWorld Service. With me, Graihagh Jackson. And me, Neal Razzell. This week a story of survival. Earlier this year Antonio
Sena was flying a small plane. A thousand meters below him the lush canopies
of the Amazon rainforest glided by. Suddenly, the engine cuts and he can't get it started. He radios in "May day" then crashes into the jungle. He survives and has the wit to get
out before the plane bursts into flame. Stunned he waits for rescue. Days pass. No-one comes. So he begins to walk. 36 days later and 25 kilos
lighter he emerges from the forest and into Brazil's limelight. Here he is on TV... To survive he says he watched what
monkeys ate and then copied them. Antonio was flying cargo to an illegal
gold mine in the Amazon. An industry, along with logging and ranching, that's
cutting down more and more trees illegally. 99% of deforestation happening
in the Amazon in 2019 was illegal. At its peak last year more than two million
trees were cut down in one day. In a day In a day. Two million trees can you imagine. That's
according to a report from Map Biomass - a project to map forests. We probably all know by now that
the Amazon's important for climate change. With the trees sucking out planet-warming gases. We're not going into the science of that... We're going into the politics. Because the Amazon's been shrinking
for decades. Why are we still talking about it? The Amazon is huge, it's twice the size of India and stretches across eight countries but most of it is in Brazil so that's where we're
focusing in on. Manuela Andreoni is a rainforest investigations fellow at the Pulitzer Center. She covers the Amazon for the New York Times. The Amazon has roughly like 20 million people
so that's like 10% of the Brazilian population. Most Brazilian people live in urban areas in the
southeastern region so the Amazon is like a far away image for most Brazilians. And even rich
Brazilians who have the ability to travel. I mean in my experience people talk more about going
to New York you know when they have the money than going to see the Amazon because while
there's tourism there it's hard to get there. Easier to get to New York from say Sao
Paulo than it is to get to the Amazon? To some areas for sure because you take a plane,
you'll take I think five hours to go to Manaus for example which is the biggest city and then you
what take a boat and be hours on a boat or days on a boat depending on where you're going. Or take
like a single engine plane and good luck to you. The whole plane crash thing is clearly fresh in
Manuela's mind too but basically when it comes to deforestation in the Amazon, out of sight is out
of mind for many Brazilians. And also to a degree off the books she says there's very little public
information about who actually owns the land there. This creates a huge incentive for an illegal land
market which means people are invading these lands, occupying these lands and selling them illegally.
And this is one of the strongest driving forces for deforestation because how do you claim a piece
of land is yours in the forest? you deforest it. Right you clear the trees and stake a claim but
who's actually doing this? Let's take to the air again, safely. I remember one day I flew eight hours
by helicopters in the frontier where deforestation was taking place and talked to people and really
tried to understand what was driving deforestation. This is Virgilio Viana. He used to be the
environment minister in the state of Amazonas in Brazil but now he's a director of a non-profit
called Foundation for Amazon Sustainability. Deforestation is a result of a complex
set of economic drivers that make people decide to deforest - not because they are stupid
or ignorant. People profit from deforestation. Manuela's met those clearing the land too. They're telling me it's work. They got to make a living and feed their families and they
shouldn't be criminalised for that. Of course the people on the field, the people
doing the work, the people sweating are the people making the real money so it's very very
uncommon for you to find the person behind it all. Often these people are in Sao Paulo like
enjoying a nice meal in a five-star restaurant. There are small groups of people who profit from
this and they have a lot of economic power and they have a lot of political power because they
help elect members of congress. So there's this tension between people who have the power to
make the decisions and to support policy that goes against protection and then you have people,
disenfranchised people, who are trying to stop it. Like indigenous peoples or activists. They're
taking huge risks to stop deforestation. The non-profit Global Witness says 24 Brazilian
environmental activists were murdered or disappeared in 2019 alone. You know for traditional
communities who are fighting these illegal organisations every day it's really dangerous
for them. You're in a place without a phone and you can't call for help. So the scale of the
place and the remoteness leads to impunity yeah. We've been focusing on how remote the Amazon
is and why that's led to the destruction of the forest but there is a city in the middle of
it that's facing another set of environmental problems. The city is called Manaus and Diane Jeantet is there for us. It's a big city of about two million people in the vast Amazon rainforest and
you can see that it's surrounded on three sides by a thick jungle and on the other by very, very large rivers. You have the enormous Rio Negro and Rio Solimoes and they meet and
become the Rio Amazonas which is the largest river in the world. And the rivers are rising. They're in the midst of a catastrophic flood. Rivers are at their highest level since
officials started keeping records in 1902. So streets are flooded, houses are
flooded, dozens of municipalities are impacted. More than 450,000 people
have suffered from this year's floods so that has meant that a lot of people have
had to abandon their houses actually. The city has also had to build kilometres of these raised wooden walkways so people can actually
get around. Diane's been out talking to people. He was
44 years old and he's selling a few products from the region
like bananas and pineapples. It rained that's the biggest flood I ever had
and it has disrupted my world. It's harder to sell the goods and we need to sell it soon before
it spoils. I think the climate is very messed up due to the global warming and I think that's
why the floods are happening so big like this. Seven of the 10 biggest floods in the Amazon basin
have occurred in the past 13 years. It's very hard to attribute a specific flood like this one to
climate change there are always so many factors involved. But the trend in Manaus as we've heard
has been for more and more extreme flooding. And yet this region voted for President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. A man who is pushing policies through congress that could accelerate deforestation
and in turn make climate change worse. It's not a coincidence that it's in Brazil's north
which includes the Amazon because there's a lot of small-scale farming small-scale mining and people
there tend to be more open to the argument that it's important to quote-unquote develop the
Amazon region. Oliver Stuenkel is a professor of international relations at a university commonly
called FGV in Sao Paulo. He says development really matters. Brazil has had basically 0% growth for a decade. Increase in poverty - poverty rates hovering around 30%, you have about half the population that doesn't have access to sewage and Bolsonaro sort of likes to
say these things and say you know environmental concerns that's for other countries, if they really cared so much about it why didn't they protect their own forests. And even though that's of course
simplistic it does you know resonate in some way. The president promised to deregulate to make it
easier to occupy new lands and he's fulfilling his promise his campaign promise to make that easier
and to triple the structures that have been set up to protect the Amazon. Cripple the structures?
What are these structures he's talking about? He's basically slashed budgets and fired senior
conservation officials. It's been widely described as dismantling Brazil's environmental agencies. Here's rainforest investigator Manuela again... The agencies enforcing these laws are weak. Now some of them haven't hired a single person in a decade so we have a real problem there enforcing the law
in a challenging environment. Those who are getting hired aren't the right kind of people says former
Amazonas environment minister Virgilio. Right now we see a large number of unqualified people
taking positions that are relevant in government institutions. And then we also have allegations, which is still
not proven yet, that there are authorities in the federal government that are linked to
illegal logging and illegal gold mining. And there are allegations that
corruption goes to the very top. There was a meeting that was broadcast where
the minister of environment said, "Oh we should take this opportunity of the pandemic where
people are not looking and change all the rules that we can to weaken protections." To weaken protections isn't it the environment minister's job to protect the amazon? Yes. This minister is making us question that. I mean what is his job exactly? He's
being investigated now for his role in an international scheme to smuggle illegal timber out of the Amazon
to Europe and the United States. A supreme court judge has authorised a criminal investigation into
allegations that the environment minister Ricardo Salles obstructed a police probe into illegal
logging. Mr Salles denies any crimes been committed. President Bolsonaro's government isn't the first
to clear the forests. Deforestation rates were much higher in the 90s but levels are shooting back up
and at a time when the world is ever more aware of the Amazon's special role in terms of biodiversity
and climate change. What is the rate of deforestation doing to Brazil's reputation
abroad do you think? It's really terrible. And that has made people outside Brazil take
an interest in what happens to the Amazon. Here's international relations expert Oliver again... There's been lots of development aid being spent by especially European countries such as the Amazon fund which has been financing projects to preserve the forest. The Amazon fund was a
Norwegian initiative that pumped more than a billion dollars into Brazil. It was frozen in 2019 after President Bolsonaro sacked the board that ran the project. The president was defiant,
he said take the money and reforest Germany. He was on the back foot at the
time because the Amazon was a blaze. It's shocking how fast we've seen
this fire march. It's moved about 200 yards in the past five minutes alone fueled by
this wind. We're gonna try to get moving a little bit faster to get out of its way. Keep going! The scenes caused outrage around the world. France's president Emmanuel Macron tweeted
our house is burning then he said leaders of the world's richest countries needed
to meet and talk about what to do. President Bolsonaro said Macron was betraying
quote "a colonialist mindset" then he seemed to endorse rude comments about Mr Macron's wife
on Facebook it was all very unedifying. But it does show the tension and sensitivity about who owns the Amazon. Well I mean it's a sensitive topic in Brazil. Over the past two centuries
the Brazilian government has had a very limited presence there and if you have the
French president, Macron saying that we need to talk about an international status for the
Amazon all these things to Brazilian ears sound also a bit threatening considering Brazil's
very limited state presence in the Amazon. The diplomacy around the Amazon is delicate to
say the least but diplomats aren't the only ones trying to protect the forest. Last month leading European supermarkets threatened to boycott Brazilian products if Brazil passed a bill to provide amnesty to some of those deforesting public land illegally. And some Brazilian producers
are taking this very seriously. I am Marcello Britto. I am the president of the Brazilian
agribusiness association. Agribusiness represents around 26% of the Brazilian GDP, represents
almost 40% of the Brazilian exports and also responsible for almost 20% of the
total jobs in Brazil. So it is very very important to us. He fears for brand Brazil... So the Brazil name is the most important thing that we have and deforestation is impacting in a bad way, in a very bad way, our brand of Brazil and this brings bad impact over several products that we export. So what are they going to do about it? We're putting pressure on top of the government so we are doing
our part but we live in a democratic country and believe me I don't agree with the voters but
this is one of the problem of the democracies sometimes we have the wrong people in the wrong
place but most of the time we have nice people on the right place and that we hope for the near
future in brazil. Voters will have the ultimate say at the next elections in October 2022. It's not just pressure at home. International political pressure is ramping up too. President Bolsonaro no longer has a political soul mate in the White House. In Washington President
Biden has a very different world view when it comes to climate and the environment. So when Biden held his big Earth Day summit in April President Bolsonaro surprised a lot of people with
a pledge, including Manuela... He promised there to end illegal deforestation by 2030 which was a
target that Brazil already had before he came into power and he just reinstated. Is it right that the day after the Earth Day summit the president cut the funding to the environment ministry is that true? Yeah that happened. He promised to double it and then the next day he cut it. Since then they have recovered a lot of that budget and given much more money to the agency. Right, so this is quite interesting so after years of defunding enforcement and environmental regulation you're
saying that Brazil might have just turned a corner or might be in the process of turning a corner? I don't know, I don't know if I would say that. It remains to be seen. There are so many aspects to
it. What's missing is not money it's political will. The political will has been there before. Between 2004 and 2012 the rate of deforestation fell by more than 80%. What's more it coincided
with a time with high rates of economic growth too. That's around the time Virgilio was the
environment minister in the state of Amazonas. They had better enforcement back then as
we've heard but his strategy also had a pair of guiding economic ideas
that are different from today. Making forests worth more standing than cut,
taking care of people that take care of the forest. It's very important to create jobs and reduce
poverty and increase income in the Amazon. One has to remember that the Amazon has some of
the lowest income levels of Brazil. The issue is which kind of jobs should be generated?
Should we generate jobs from illegal gold mining that result in destruction of rivers and forests
and prostitution and crime in all of this? Is this the kind of jobs we should look for
or should we look for jobs associated with sustainable use of native biodiversity? I'm guessing he wants the sustainable ones? Yes. Give me an example. Well like finding ways of adding value to the things that are already found in the Amazon, like the fruit and the nuts and the fish. Things that are naturally there. We should also encourage industries that can add even more value to these products such as cosmetics, medicinal products. These are the kinds of jobs that I think we should generate. Easier said than done though. Professor of international relations Oliver Stuenkel says. President Bolsonaro needs votes. I would say that the people who actively benefit economically from environmental deregulation are so important to Bolsonaro that he prefers to be subject to international pressure he prefers to be a pariah on the environmental front, to not walk back on his promises to deregulate environmentally. So I would say it's a crucial part of his electoral coalition especially now as he's eyeing the election late 2022. Most of us won't be voting in that election. The only way outsiders can vote on what's happening in the Amazon is with their wallets. What strikes me is how we're still getting to
grips with the Amazon. We've been talking about it for decades but in part because it's so big
and so remote Brazilians are still working out who owns it and that ambiguity means those
with the chainsaws are having a field day. This week the producer was Darin Graham
with help from researcher Zoe Gelber. The series producer is Ros Jones, the editor is Emma Rippon and the show was mixed by Tom Brignell.
