14 TheEconomistAugust 3rd 2019
1T
he amazon basin, most of which sits
within the borders of Brazil, contains
40% of the world’s tropical forests and ac-
counts for 10-15% of the biodiversity of
Earth’s continents. Since the 1970s nearly
800,000km^2 of Brazil’s original 4m km^2
(1.5m square miles) of Amazon forest has
been lost to logging, farming, mining,
roads, dams and other forms of develop-
ment—an area equivalent to that of Turkey,
and bigger than that of Texas. Over the
same period, the average temperature in
the basin has risen by about 0.6°C. This
century, the region has suffered a series of
severe droughts.
Both the reduction in tree coverage and
the change in climate were endangering
the forest’s future well before Brazil’s gen-
eral elections of October 2018. But after that
the forest faced another threat: Jair Bolso-
naro, the new president, and arguably the
most environmentally dangerous head of
state in the world.From 2004 to 2012 the rate of deforesta-
tion in the Brazilian Amazon slowed. The
government’s environmental protection
agency, Ibama, was strengthened. Other
countries, and global ngos, nagged and en-
couraged; in 2008 an international Ama-
zon Fund was created to help pay for pro-
tection. Not a moment too soon, said
rainforest scientists. They had begun to
suspect that, if tree loss passed a certain
threshold, the deforestation would start to
feed on itself. Beyond this tipping-point,
forest cover would keep shrinking whatev-
er humans might try to do to stop it. Even-
tually much of the basin would be drier sa-
vannah, known as cerrado. As well as
spelling extinction for tens of thousands of
species, that devastation would change
weather patterns over much of South
America and release into the atmosphere
tens of billions of tonnes of carbon, wors-
ening global warming.
This hopeful period of slower defores-tation was not to last. Even before Mr Bol-
sonaro, deforestation began to tick up (see
chart 1, on next page). In 2012, under then-
president Dilma Rousseff, Brazil’s congress
passed a new forest code that gave amnesty
to those who had taken part in illegal defor-
estation before 2008. In 2017 Michel Temer,
the next president, signed a law that
streamlined the privatisation of occupied
public lands, which spurred land grabs in
the Amazon. During the deep recession of
2014-16 the environment ministry’s budget
was slashed. Between August 2017 and July
2018 Brazil lost 7,900km^2 of Amazon for-
est—nearly a billion trees—the highest rate
of deforestation for a decade.Heaven’s high canopy
According to preliminary satellite data,
since Mr Bolsonaro took office in January,
the Amazon has lost roughly 4,300km^2 of
forest, which means this year’s total will
surely outstrip last year’s. This is not a
fluke. The president appears to want the
country to return to the time of Brazil’s mil-
itary dictatorship, when big infrastructure
projects prompted widespread destruction
in the name of development.
A few of Mr Bolsonaro’s plans have been
curbed. Pressure from Tereza Cristina, the
agriculture minister, and the farm lobby
led him to withdraw his threat to leave the
Paris climate agreement and from abolish-On the brink
NOVA XAVANTINA AND SANTARÉM
The world’s largest rainforest is approaching the point of its irreversible
destructionBriefing The Amazon