There are increasingly worried noises coming from former world leaders and other people about the marches taking place in Brazil.
These marches appear to be modelled after the US insurrection, and the ground work which Donald Trump laid – suggesting that it would be impossible for him to loose in a fair fight. In the USA Donald Trump did indeed try hard to stop it being a fair fight, he tried to cheat in many ways.
The problem is that in Brazil, Jair Bolsonaro is former army captain and so it is far easier to see him launching a coup to stay in power.
Like Trump, Bolsonaro has not really tried to reach out to people outside his base, and like Trump the majority of his policies have been aimed at short-term gains, ignoring the long-term issues that the policies come with.
Large parts of the Brazilian rainforest are already not functioning properly, and it is now estimated that the Brazilian part of this rainforest is emitting 1 billion tonnes of carbon more than it is absorbing.
Some might argue that if the Amazon is emitting more carbon than it is absorbing, is it worth protecting? Well, if the Amazon rainforest is destroyed completely, virtually all the carbon it currently has locked up will be emitted and this amounts to about 200 gigatons, or roughly 5 times the amount the whole world emitted in 2019 (this is the highest emissions in history, and likely has not been topped, merely, because of Covid lockdowns artificially stifling the amount released. Another way of looking at it, is that if we loose the Amazon rainforest, this will cause emissions roughly equal to half the remaining carbon budget of the whole earth, if we are to have a hope of holding temperature rises to 1.5C. This maximum level of temperature rise was calculated as being the point at which large changes will be unavoidable.
This is all a very long-winded way of saying that we cannot afford a second term with Bolsonaro in charge. It is very clear that the vast majority of Brazils population are not pleased with his performance.
From the indigenous people, whom he has shown nothing but disgust, to women that he has continually insulted to these disabled or with long-term illness which Bolsonaro has risked the lives of by his terrible performance with Covid (Indeed while Brazil has the 6th largest population, their covid cases are the third highest in the world (and have had the same number of cases as Russia the UK and France which lie in positions 4,5 and 6)) the only groups that he still has strong support of, is from a few specific parts of the country and here he generally only has the support of the White males.
So why should we be concerned, in the conservation field, with a second Bolsonaro term? A second term is likely to make damage to the Brazilian Rainforest so severe that it may not recover as fast as the human race needs.
The world will continue quite happily without the Brazilian rainforest. There are likely to be a whole range of wildlife lost, (could we loose the Jaguar? well it lives in a wide range of habitats so it would probably cling on, but in far smaller numbers than now) but many more will survive. Brazil is already likely to be one of the hardest hit by the changing climate, so this is likely to hit them harder than much of the rest of the world. What is clear, is that the biggest threat to our current way of life is climate change, and this will get far worse if we are left with Bolsonaro running things in Brazil for any longer than his current term.
Do let me know what you think
