912 27 MAY 2022 • VOL 376 ISSUE 6596 science.org SCIENCE
government from freezing FNDCT funds,
MCTI’s overall budget for this year is still
34% smaller than 5 years ago, not counting
inflation.
INPE’s annual budget, meanwhile, plunged
by 63% from 2010, to a record low of just
76 million reais ($15 million) in 2021. Even
after the recent boost, it is still “obviously be-
hind what is needed,” De Nardin tells Science.
The consequences have been felt at every
corner of the institute. The budget dedicated
to the two rainforest monitoring programs
declined by 70% in the past decade, to
2.7 million reais ($540,000) last year—about
0.1% of what New York City spends on its De-
partment of Parks & Recreation annually. “If
there are more budget constraints, we will
have to stop doing something; maybe reduce
the area we monitor,” says INPE’s senior tech-
nologist Cláudio Almeida, who coordinates
the two programs.
Keeping an eye on other corners of Bra-
zil’s rich biodiversity has also been challeng-
ing. One program tracks deforestation and
wildfires in the Cerrado, 2 million square
kilometers of shrubland bordering the Ama-
zon forest that covers most of central Brazil.
Among the world’s most biodiverse savannas,
the Cerrado is under heavy pressure; more
than half has already been cleared for crops
and cattle. Last year, Almeida’s team avoided
shutting down the program only by transfer-
ring money from another project at the last
minute. They hope a FNDCT grant of 15 mil-
lion reais ($3 million), released in late April,
will keep the program going another 3 years.
The funding crisis is “very worrisome,”
says Julia Shimbo, an ecologist at the non-
governmental Amazon Environmental Re-
search Institute. INPE’s data are not only
used for public policies on deforestation, she
notes, but are also a reference for interna-
tional agreements on greenhouse gas emis-
sions to which Brazil has committed.
The cash crunch creates other problems as
well. After 12 years, Tupã is on its last legs.
Processors frequently get overheated, circuit
breaks are not uncommon, and the insti-
tute can barely afford the electricity to run
the computer. “This obsolescence affects the
country’s climate research, weather forecasts,
and INPE’s mission itself,” says environmen-
tal physicist Paulo Artaxo of the University of
São Paulo’s main campus, one of many exter-nal scientists who have stopped using Tupã.
There is no money for a replacement. As
a makeshift solution, INPE bought a second,
smaller and less powerful machine in 2018
that took over weather forecasting and other
everyday operational processes, while the old
supercomputer is mostly used for research.
Last year, with funds from the United Na-
tions Development Programme, it bought a
set of additional processors for Tupã. But if
the old machine dies, Brazil’s climate mod-
eling program might shut down. The agency
has submitted a request to the Brazilian
Innovation Agency for 200 million reais
($40 million) to upgrade its entire computer
system. Even if the project is approved, it will
take at least a year until the new machinery
is ready to work.
LIT, the satellite development facility, has
also suffered heavily. Its last major project
was the Amazonia-1, the first satellite en-
tirely developed in Brazil, launched from
India in February 2021. It added an extra
eye in the sky to watch over the Amazon,
increasing the frequency at which images of
the region are generated and allowing faster
deforestation alerts.
Amazonia-1’s launch was a cause for cel-
ebration, but the success masked many prob-
lems. A lack of funds had delayed the mission
by 3 years. Most researchers working on it
had lost their grant by that time; the grants
had to be reinstated temporarily to make the
launch possible. And funds are lacking to de-
velop two long-planned companion satellites.
“The discontinuity of this project is a shot
at the heart of the Brazilian space program,”
says former INPE Director Ricardo Galvão.
As a continental country with huge areas of
native vegetation and crops, Brazil needs a
whole constellation of new satellites to meet
its remote sensing demands, Galvão says.
To save on LIT’s formidable electricity bill,
INPE has reduced its operations, shutting
down cleanrooms from time to time. The
room where spacecraft were assembled now
houses the skeleton of a satellite, built from
spare pieces of the Amazonia-1, “to show off
to visiting politicians and journalists,” an
employee tells Science. LIT has long tested
products for industry on the side, such as
cars, phones, and even bathtubs; today that
is practically all it does.
De Nardin says the institute is looking for
funds to develop new Amazonia satellites.
But meanwhile, Genaro, who has worked
at the institute’s space systems division for
20 years, says, “All we have are loose ideas
on paper, without any budget or a team to
execute them.”MONEY IS NOT THE ONLY resource in short
supply. There’s also a dearth of brains, es-
pecially young ones. INPE has seen a strik- IMAGE: LGI/DIOTG/INPEAn image from the Amazonia-1 satellite shows a dark island of rainforest in the Parakanã Indigenous Territory
in Para state, surrounded by fi elds and pastures. Monitoring deforestation has helped Brazil protect the Amazon.