by BRASILIA, Brazil (AP) — On a visit to survey the damage caused by drought and fires in the Amazon, President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva pledged to pave a road that environmentalists and some members of his own government say could massively increase the destruction of the world’s largest tropical forest and contribute to climate change.
The BR-319 is a mostly unpaved road through the rainforest that connects the states of Amazonas and Roraima with the rest of the country. It ends in Manaus, the Amazon’s largest city with over 2 million inhabitants, and runs parallel to the Rio Madeira, a major tributary of the Amazon. The water level of the Rio Madeira is at its lowest since records began, hampering freight traffic. Most of its riverbed is now endless sand dunes under a smoky sky.
“We are aware that the highway did not have the importance it has today when the Madeira River was still navigable and full. We cannot isolate two capitals from each other. But we will do it with the utmost responsibility,” Lula said on Tuesday during a visit to an indigenous community in Manaquiri in the state of Amazonas. He did not provide any information on what steps the government will take to prevent further deforestation after the asphalting.
A few hours later, he oversaw the signing of a contract to asphalt 52 kilometers of the road and promised to start work on the most controversial section of the road – a 400-kilometer stretch through pristine forest – before the end of his term in 2026.
A permit for the longer section was granted under Lula’s far-right predecessor, Jair Bolsonaro, who favored Amazon development and weakened environmental protections. In July, a federal court suspended the permit following a lawsuit by the Climate Observatory, a network of 119 environmental, civil society and academic groups.
Lula’s government had appealed against the suspension, but it was only during his visit on Tuesday that Lula made it clear that he wanted to continue with the paving work. The Climate Observatory regretted the move.
“Without the forest there is no water, everything is interconnected,” says Suely Araújo, a public policy coordinator for the group. “Asphalting the central section of the BR-319 without guaranteeing the environmental impact assessment and the government’s presence in the area will lead to historic deforestation, as many experts and the Brazilian Federal Environmental Agency have stressed in the authorization process.”
Lula has tried to portray himself as an environmentalist, and deforestation has dropped significantly since he succeeded Bolsonaro. But he has also at times bucked pressure from richer countries to preserve the Amazon, an invaluable resource for the planet that stores carbon that drives atmospheric warming, and did so again on Tuesday.
“The world that buys our food is demanding that we protect the Amazon,” he said. “And why? Because they want us to take care of the air they breathe. They didn’t protect their own land in the last century during the Industrial Revolution.”
Brazil is suffering from the worst drought on record. 59 percent of the country is affected – an area about half the size of the USA. In the Amazon region, hundreds of river communities are threatened with extinction due to low water levels in the rivers and are suffering from shortages of drinking water and food. During his visit to the region, Lula announced the large-scale distribution of water filters and other measures.
Meanwhile, most of Brazil is covered in a thick layer of smoke from the Amazon forest fires. Millions of people in far-flung cities such as Sao Paulo, Brasilia and Curitiba have been affected by the fires, which extend as far as Argentina and Paraguay. At Lula’s event, Environment Minister Marina Silva blamed the extreme drought brought about by climate change for the widespread fires in a rainforest that is normally fire-resistant. She called it “a phenomenon that we don’t even know how to deal with.”
Silva was more cautious than Lula in paving the road. At a hearing before Congress, she called the Bolsonaro-era approval a “farce” and praised the court ruling that overturned it.
Brazil is the world’s fifth-largest emitter of greenhouse gases, accounting for nearly three percent of global emissions, according to Climate Watch, an online platform run by the World Resources Institute. Nearly half of these emissions come from the destruction of trees in the Amazon rainforest.
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