Brazil's election could have a huge impact on the world's climate
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Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro is in a runoff reelection campaign, and the results of the contest on Oct. 30 will have a major impact on the fate of the Amazon rainforest and on climate change worldwide.
“It’s the most important election remaining this year in the world,” Nick Zimmerman, a former National Security Council director for Brazil who is now senior adviser for the consulting firm WestExec Advisors, told Yahoo News. “Bolsonaro has a terrible track record [on climate change]. Deforestation has again skyrocketed under his presidency.”
Bolsonaro and former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, commonly referred to as Lula, emerged as the top two vote getters in the first round of voting, in a contest that has unusually high stakes. On the environment and on many other issues, the two candidates diverge significantly, but the Amazon rainforest is not a purely domestic issue, and carries an outsize impact on climate change worldwide.
Bolsonaro is a pugnacious right-winger sometimes called “the Trump of the tropics.” Prioritizing economic development in the relatively poor Amazon region, he has allowed deforestation to increase rapidly since taking office on New Year’s Day 2019, and he has planned new hydropower dams in the region that could further damage the rainforest ecosystem. He has also extended the life of coal plants and subsidies for the coal industry and is planning new infrastructure for drilling and exporting oil and natural gas.
Like that of former President Donald Trump — a supporter of Bolsonaro who has dismissed climate change as a “hoax” — the Brazilian president’s administration has downplayed concern about climate change. “There is no climate change catastrophe,” Brazilian Foreign Minister Ernesto Araujo said in September 2019 at the conservative American think tank the Heritage Foundation.
In the Oct. 2 general election, out of a field of 11 candidates, Lula won 48.4% of the vote to Bolsonaro’s 43.2%. While Lula is slightly favored in the runoff, experts say Bolsonaro has a real chance of winning reelection. (Much like Trump, Bolsonaro has made unsupported claims that his opponents will commit electoral fraud and has threatened not to accept the outcome if he loses.)
As of 2019, Brazil was the world’s sixth-largest emitter of greenhouse gas, and it has more than 200 million people. While the overwhelming majority of emissions among most large emitters comes from burning fossil fuels for energy, one-third of Brazil’s emissions come from agriculture and land use, partly due to all the carbon that is released when trees are logged (and often burned) to make way for farms and ranches.
Rainforests absorb about 10% of the world’s current carbon emissions, so their destruction is devastating not just because of the carbon released by deforestation, but because the planet — perhaps permanently — loses critical carbon sinks. Meanwhile, the farming and ranching that replace them can be significant carbon emitters.
Almost 400,000 square miles of the Amazonian rainforest, the world’s largest, have been destroyed since 1978. Brazil already ranks fourth in cumulative historical greenhouse gas emissions when deforestation is factored in, behind the United States, China and Russia.
In March, a study published in the journal Nature Climate Change found that the Amazon may be near a tipping point: Since the early 2000s, as warmer temperatures dry out the rainforest, areas that endure droughts or wildfires are taking longer to recover, and signs of loss have been found in more than three-quarters of the Amazon. The study’s authors warned that if climate change continues, parts of the Amazon may fail to grow back as rainforest, after suffering from damage from events like droughts and wildfires. That phenomenon, called “dieback,” would dramatically accelerate climate change.
Bolsonaro accused Brazil’s National Institute for Space Research, without evidence, of fabricating data. He also dramatically reduced the frequency with which fines for illegal logging and mining were imposed, triggering an explosion in deforestation, according to reporting by the journal Nature. As a result, the institute’s data shows deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has surged since 2019. In 2021 it reached its highest level since 2008.
“[Deforestation] is a problem that goes just beyond [Bolsonaro’s] presidency, but he has systematically gone about trying to neuter the monitoring and enforcement by environmental protection authorities in the federal bureaucracy,” said Zimmerman, who is also a global fellow at the Wilson Center Brazil Institute.
The increase in deforestation is not just a problem for climate change: The Amazon has a number of Indigenous communities and an array of unique plant and animal species, accounting for 25% of the world’s biodiversity.
“The impact of deforestation keeps encroaching on Indigenous lands,” Beto Borges, director of the Communities and Territorial Governance Initiative at Forest Trends, a nonprofit that combats deforestation, told Yahoo News at the U.N. climate summit in Glasgow, Scotland, last year.
Illegal mining has also increased significantly in recent years. Bolsonaro has further slashed funding for scientific research and shut down the government's Amazon Fund, which had collected donations from rich countries such as Norway and Denmark to help prevent deforestation. Thanks to widespread hydropower usage, Brazil has a relatively low rate of fossil fuel consumption for energy, but earlier this year the national government contracted for a massive purchase of new gas power.
In Glasgow last November, Brazil reiterated a commitment to reduce emissions in general, and it made a new promise to cut methane emissions by 30% by 2030. But Bolsonaro was among the minority of heads of state who did not attend the climate negotiations in person, and climate activists were skeptical that he would actually adopt policies to achieve those emissions reductions.
Lula and his left-wing party, the Workers’ Party, also known as the PT, have displayed more interest in controlling deforestation and combating climate change.
“Traditionally, Lula and Lula’s party, the Workers’ Party, the PT, had not been particularly green,” Zimmerman said. “Like many across the country’s ideological spectrum,” they “see the management of the Amazon very much in sovereignty terms,” and therefore bristle at criticism from wealthier countries that have much higher emissions per capita.
Nonetheless, during Lula's two terms as president, from 2003 to 2010, Brazil reduced the rate of deforestation in its portion of the Amazon by more than 70%.
In the run-up to the 2015 U.N. Climate Change Conference in Paris, also known as COP21, Lula’s successor and fellow PT member President Dilma Rousseff made a joint announcement with President Barack Obama pledging coordinated climate action. Both countries committed to increase the share of wind and solar power in their countries by 20% by 2030, and to collaborate on clean energy research and development. The promise of action to reduce emissions by a large developing country was seen at the time as a major victory in global climate diplomacy.
Bolsonaro’s intransigence on climate change has given Lula more political incentive to draw a contrast on the issue, and he has adopted a tone in this campaign more favorable toward the environment, according to Zimmerman. Lula “has said that he understands that sustainable development, getting deforestation down, that these things are critical,” Zimmerman said.
In June, Lula unveiled a platform to combat illegal logging and meet Brazil’s emissions-reduction targets as set out in the Paris Agreement. Last month he added a host of new environmental policies, including a fee for carbon emissions and subsidies for sustainable farming. Lula does support expanded oil and gas drilling, however, arguing that they are needed for “energy security.”
“There is an opportunity to really correct the signals sent by the current president,” Natalie Unterstell, the president of the Institute Talanoa, a climate policy think tank, told Yahoo News.
A spokesperson for Lula has said that, as president, he would update the country’s “insufficient” climate plan at COP27 next month in Sharm-el Sheikh, Egypt. Lula has proposed that the Democratic Republic of the Congo and Indonesia, which include the second- and third-largest rainforests in the world, respectively, form an alliance with Brazil at COP27 to pressure developed countries to provide funding to divert rainforest residents into less harmful means of economic development.
“If Lula were to win — and that’s still a big if, given Bolsonaro’s stronger-than-expected performance in the first round — his government would have a colossal amount to do,” Guy Edwards, an expert on climate change and Latin America who is currently a PhD candidate at the U.K.'s University of Sussex, told Yahoo News. “Rescuing and beefing up environmental enforcement agencies gutted by Bolsonaro is urgently required, as well the demarcation and protection of Indigenous lands, many of which have been violently invaded.”
“There’s a general expectation that, were Lula to become president, you’ll see the return of a serious, proactive Brazilian COP negotiating partner, and you’ll see the restoration of the federal government’s ability to monitor and enforce” laws against illegal logging and mining, Zimmerman said.
International climate policy experts say that such a shift in Brazil’s posture would improve the chances that stronger global climate action can be agreed upon at COP27. “A renewed willingness for Brazil to try to take a constructive position and to try to really engage around this issue could be a really tremendous development,” Peter Ogden, vice president for energy, climate and the environment at the United Nations Foundation, told Yahoo News. “That could be a real boost for global deforestation action.”
But Lula would have to win first. If he doesn’t, the country will go in a very different direction.
“A second Bolsonaro term could push this awesome rainforest past an irreversible tipping point, which could prove catastrophic for global efforts to arrest the deepening climate and ecological crises,” Edwards said.
