FEATURE-Family men or forest destroyers? Meet the miners living off the Amazon s gold Reuters 1/21/2021
By Lucas Landau and Fabio Teixeira
ITAITUBA, Brazil, Jan 21 (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - One man working deep in Brazil s Amazon said he knows how to stop the illegal logging, gold mining, deforestation and fires plaguing the region: let President Jair Bolsonaro carry out his plans to develop the rainforest. If people listen to him and believe in his ideas . many of the environmental issues would improve here in the Amazon, said the 53-year-old wildcat miner, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Grande.
Grande s views are in direct opposition to those of leaders and environmentalists all over the world, who point to Bolsonaro s call to open up the Amazon to mining and agriculture as a driving force behind the rainforest s rampant destruction.
Alemão, a wildcat miner in Brazil’s Amazon, sifts through excavated rock for gold in a protected reserve in Para state, August 20, 2020. Image: Thomson Reuters Foundation/Lucas Landau
One man working deep in Brazil’s Amazon said he knows how to stop the illegal logging, gold mining, deforestation and fires plaguing the region: let President Jair Bolsonaro carry out his plans to develop the rainforest.
“If people listen to him and believe in his ideas … many of the environmental issues would improve here in the Amazon,” said the 53-year-old wildcat miner, who asked to be identified only by his nickname, Grande.
Brazil's government needs to do more to combat rising illegal deforestation in the Amazon rainforest that is damaging the country's business reputation, said João Paulo Ferreira, Latin America CEO at cosmetics maker Natura & Co.
Dec 31 2020 Read 714 Times
While COVID-19 has impacted all facets of our lives across the globe, one of the lesser-explored environmental implications of coronavirus has been its effect on deforestation. While optimists may have speculated that a drop-off in industrial activity on the whole may have been replicated in logging and land clearing activities, the opposite appears to have happened.
That’s down to the opportunism of certain politicians, who have used the fact that the rest of the world is distracted by their efforts to contain the virus in order to push through environmentally unsustainable legislative reforms. In particular, the Brazilian government has viewed the pandemic as an “opportunity” to relax laws protecting the Amazon rainforest and ramp up their deforestation efforts.
5 Min Read
BRASILIA (Thomson Reuters Foundation) - Continuing large-scale deforestation in Brazil’s Amazon region suggests a new government aim to become “carbon neutral” by 2060 lacks credibility, Brazilian scientists said Thursday.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement on climate change, countries are due to submit updated plans to cut planet-heating emissions and better adapt to climate impacts by the end of this year.
But Brazil’s revised plan, announced this week, lacks updated goals to cut emissions by 2030, suggesting it will not put the country on a realistic path to carbon neutrality by 2060, scientists said.
“This shows that Brazil is not interested in contributing to solving the problem of the climate crisis,” said Márcio Astrini, executive secretary of the Climate Observatory, in a telephone interview with the Thomson Reuters Foundation.