Jair Bolsorano has only been the president of Brazil for two weeks and they have a similarly long time between election and inauguration that the United States does. Unfortunately even in that extremely short period of time he has already demonstrated a willingness and determination to be as bad for the environment as he was expected to be when he ran.
There are two policies that he has already started to put into place which are likely to hugely increase the deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon rainforest.
The first of these might initially be thought merely as a administrative change that would make things more efficient. He is going to merge the government department responsible for looking after forestry with the department looking after agriculture. However there are several huge problems with this. The first is quite obvious, the agricultural lobby obviously wants to be able to farm as much land as possible, the forestry department however is responsible for maintaining the forests intact as much as possible. Obviously if you merge these two there is going to be a significant clash of these two policies and given that it is the agricultural lobby who has been desperate for extra land it is thought that this was simply lead to huge further areas of the rainforest being cut down. The second is equally scary, in that Bolsonaro has made it very clear that he does not see any reason to allow indigenous people any of the rights that they have so far gained.
His speeches was suggest that he feels that the indigenous people have no right to any place in Brazil and that the European settlers are the true Brazilians. He has stated that he will deny any claims to land by tribes that have not yet been granted any, and he is going to start seizing land. As with the above he has given the department the right to decide on indigenous lands. Given that they hold large tracts of land that the agricultural lobby wish to be able to farm this is not likely to lead to good governance.
Unfortunately this was entirely expected when he was elected but the speed with which he is trying to put it in place with suggest that he feels he has no support to carry it through.
In the last few years the deforestation rate in South America has fallen as the rate in the Congo Basin has increased. Now it seems we are back to a situation where both the last great South American Rainforest and African Rainforest are deeply under threat. It seems unnecessary for me to point out that stopping runaway climate change requires both of these rain forests as carbon sinks and without either it is going to make it very difficult to keep the global warming to levels that allow humans to thrive in the future.
