The forest in pastures
The Brazilian Amazon, which nevertheless provides a home for one tenth of the world's species, has reduced its surface area by 20% in fifty years. Cattle ranching is the culprit here: it accounts for 80% of the Amazon's surface area that has been razed, and the rest is due in particular to the cultivation of soybeans, although its impact has been greatly reduced following several agreements. Since 1970, the Amazon forest has lost the equivalent of the surface of Spain. Jair Bolsonaro has cleared even more land for agribusiness as well as for gold miners, to the point that deforestation increased by 85% in 2019, the year he took power, compared to the previous year. He has also announced that he wants to redraw the surfaces of protected areas, which he says are "holding back Brazil's progress." Weakened by deforestation, the Amazon is also plagued by increasingly deadly fires. Those of 2019 are still remembered: between January and August, more than 40,000 fires reduced to ashes nearly one million hectares. Drought and global warming are in the dock. But suspicion is also turning to Bolsonaro's supporters, who are believed to have set the fires to free up land for agriculture.
Rio de Janeiro, on its own scale, is not doing much better. The Mata Atlântica, which once clothed it, as well as most of the Brazilian coastline, is now a ruin. Only 10% of it remains in Brazil. One of these relics, the Tijuca Forest, covers the marvelous city in what is the largest urban forest in the world. It is, in fact, a secondary forest, which was replanted during the reign of Pedro II, who planted 100,000 native trees in thirteen years.
Invasive waste
Brazil consumes like a rich country, but recycles like an emerging country. Barely 3% of waste is recycled, and this rate is decreasing, since it was 4.25% in 2010. This is due to a lack of infrastructure, only 15% of the population have access to recycling, which remains poor, even among them, due to the lack of awareness campaigns. We owe the little recycling done in Brazil to the catadores, these informal workers who crisscross the streets of Rio and Brazil to collect waste and get a few cents of deposit. It is estimated that they are responsible for 90% of recycling in Brazil. They have even made Brazil the world champion in can recycling: each can brought back is worth about one cent.
The result of this precarious recycling policy is that almost half of the waste ends up in illegal dumps, polluting the water table, the soil and the ocean. The beach of São Conrado, west of Ipanema, paid the price in 2021, when a wave of thousands of plastic waste fell on it. Brazil is the fourth largest producer of plastic in the world.
Olympic Games: broken promises
At the opening ceremony in 2016, in front of the world's cameras, the athletes together sowed 13,000 seeds of 207 species of native trees in Brazil, with the goal of replanting Rio's Atlantic Forest. Once the cameras were turned off, the promising announcement was shunned by public agencies and private companies. The first seed, which in the meantime has become a shrub, was not planted in the Carioca soil until 2019. Today, the project is still not completed, while the "athletes' forest" was planned for the opening of the Tokyo Games in 2020 ... The irony is that in addition to this unfulfilled promise, one of the few surviving areas has been destroyed. Indeed, the Olympic golf course has been installed in a protected area, the natural reserve of Marapendi. The famous Mata Atlântica has been razed. The golf course, today abandoned for lack of budget to maintain it, has still not seen the fauna come to repopulate it.
The other main promise of the committee was the cleaning of the bay of Guanabara, terribly polluted by the sewage and the plastic waste. At the opening of the Games, no depollution in sight, so much so that the dermatological problems and other intoxications multiplied at the athletes... One of the objectives was however to reduce by 80 % the quantity of rejected used water. No improvement in water quality has been seen to date.
Mariana: an unprecedented ecological disaster
In November 2015, Mariana, a small town in Minas Gerais, was the scene of the worst ecological disaster Brazil has ever seen. A dam broke, and millions of tons of toxic mud flooded the region. Because it is not a banal fresh water dam, which overhung the city, but well a retention of waste resulting from an iron mine upstream. In a few hours, the towns of Bento Rodrigues and Paracatu de Baixo were wiped off the map, swallowed up by the river of mud that travelled 600 km. This torrent flowed into the Rio Doce, home to many endangered or endemic species, whose survival is still uncertain to this day, for lack of extensive studies. It then landed in the Atlantic Ocean, which is estimated to take centuries to eliminate the mine tailings.
The mining sector, one of the pillars of the economy of Minas Gerais (literally "general mines" in Portuguese), did not stop there, however. Another mining dam by the same operator broke in Brumadinho in 2019. Although the amount of sludge released was three times less, the human and environmental toll was also colossal.
Institutions in charge of the environment
In this federal state, several institutions share responsibility for the environment. The highest of these is the Ministério do Meio Ambiante, the Ministry of the Environment, located in Brasilia. It has been setting the guidelines for Brazil's environmental policy since its creation in 1985.
It also oversees the IBAMA (Brazilian Institute of Environment and Renewable Natural Resources), which has a monitoring and enforcement role.
Finally, the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) has the heavy task of managing the country's 1,000 protected areas. It is named after Chico Mendes, a rubber tapper who died fighting to protect the Amazon.
National parks
Brazil has 70 national parks, but many more reserves and protected areas. The state of Rio de Janeiro has five of them. The Parque nacional da Tijuca - Floresta da Tijuca is, of course, the best known. It must be said that, along its 4,000 hectares, it includes many symbols of the city (Pedra da Gávea, Corcovado, Christ the Redeemer...) in a spectacular environment. Generous, the forest not only offers a home to many living beings, such as the common coati(Nasua nasua), the common marmoset(Callithris jachus) or the woolly porcupine(Sphiggurus insidiosus), endemic to Brazil. It also offers its abundance to the inhabitants of the marvelous city, through numerous springs, its roots that prevent erosion, its soils that absorb floods and its leaves that dampen air pollution. The Serra da Bocaina National Park, with more than 100,000 hectares, is the largest in the state. It was created in 1971, straddling the states of Rio and São Paulo, to build a vegetation shield around two nuclear power plants, to prevent a potential accident. However, it does not only protect human beings, as many threatened animal and plant species find refuge there. Five mammals endemic to the Atlantic forest inhabit it, including four species of monkeys, and a rodent related to the porcupine, the Sphiggurus villosus.
The state of Rio, always a pioneer in Brazil, also has the first two national parks in the country: Parque nacional do Itatiaia, created in 1937, and Serra dos Orgãos, in 1939. The first one, which means "pointed rock" in Tupi, an indigenous language, is aptly named, as it contains the fifth highest Brazilian peak, Pico das Agulhas Negras. The second one also owes its name to its mountains, which are reminiscent of the pipes of an organ (orgão in Portuguese). Finally, the Parque nacional da Restinga da Jurubatiba includes a typically Brazilian ecosystem called restinga. It is a cord of sandy soil that encloses part of the water. This is not only the largest restinga, but also the best preserved in the country, since it is virtually untouched by humans.
Without leaving the Rio, the Jardim Botânico is known worldwide for its spectacular collection of Brazilian and exotic plants. It has 6,500 species, some of which are threatened with extinction. The botanical garden is, in fact, in charge of cataloguing the Brazilian flora, and protecting the country's threatened species.
