From forest to pasture
The Brazilian Amazon has seen its surface area shrink by 20% over the past fifty years. 80% of the Amazon's surface area destroyed is the result of the development of extensive cattle farming, with the remainder due in particular to soya cultivation, timber and subsoil mining and gold panning. In the 1960s, the "forestry code", or código florestal, obliged Amazon landowners to keep 80% of their properties in natural areas. Unfortunately, even with the return of democracy to Brazil, this measure was never applied. In 2012, under pressure from environmentalists, President Dilma Rousseff vetoed a bill to make it easier for landowners to exploit natural areas. During his term of office, from 2019 to 2023, Jair Bolsonaro authorized the use of more land for agribusiness and gold mining, so much so that deforestation increased by 85% in his first year in office. Weakened by deforestation, the Amazon is plagued by increasingly deadly fires. In October 2023, Manaus, the capital of the state of Amazonas, suffocated under thick smoke for several weeks. Drought and global warming are to blame, but many of the fires are man-made, caused by cattle breeders.
Rio de Janeiro, on its own scale, has also been heavily impacted by deforestation, as has the entire state of Fluminense , much of which has been transformed into coffee plantations. The Mata Atlântica, which once clothed the entire state, has been reduced to the bare essentials. Only part of it remains, although it still covers 17% of the state's surface area. One of these relics, the Tijuca Forest, covers the marvellous city in what is the world's largest urban forest. It is, in fact, a secondary forest, which was replanted under the reign of Pedro II, who planted 100,000 native trees in thirteen years to reconstitute the original forest, which had been completely cleared to be transformed into coffee plantations.
The state of Minas Gerais is also one of the most active in terms of Atlantic forest deforestation. Of the 10 Brazilian municipalities with the highest deforestation rates, 5 are in Minas Gerais. However, the signs are rather positive, thanks to the joint efforts of the State and certain NGOs.
Invasive waste
Brazil consumes like a rich country, but recycles like an emerging one. Barely 3% of waste is recycled, and this rate is falling, from 4.25% in 2010, demonstrating the State's disengagement or neglect of a sector with little economic and/or political "potential". Due to a lack of infrastructure and awareness-raising campaigns, only 15% of the population have access to recycling, which remains inefficient. The small amount of recycling carried out in Brazil is the work of catadores, the informal workers who criss-cross the streets of Rio and Brazil, picking up garbage and collecting a few cents in deposits. 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 returned is worth around one cent.
As in many developing countries, almost half of all waste ends up in illegal dumps, polluting water tables, soil and the ocean. São Conrado beach, west of Ipanema, paid the price in 2021, when a wave of thousands of pieces of plastic waste washed over it. Brazil is the world's fourth largest producer of plastic. Guanabara Bay is one of the biggest centers of plastic pollution in the whole of Brazil, with over 216 thousand tonnes of plastic a year. Recycling is only part of the answer, but it is not the only solution to a much more global problem. For environmentalists, it's all about stopping plastic production.
Olympic Games: broken promises
At the opening ceremony of the 2016 Rio Olympics, in front of the world's cameras, athletes together sowed 13,000 seeds from 207 species of tree indigenous to Brazil, symbolically replanting Rio's Atlantic forest. The Games were supposed to be socially and ecologically sustainable, which was one of the conditions under which the event was awarded. As is so often the case, once the cameras had left the site, the good intentions went unheeded. The first seeds, now shrubs, were not planted in the Carioca soil until 2019. In 2024, the project has still not been completed, even though the "athletes' forest" was planned for the opening of the Tokyo Games in 2020... Worse still, one of the few preserved areas has been destroyed. The Olympic golf course has been set up in the Marapendi nature reserve. The original Mata Atlântica has thus been sacrificed on the altar of fame. The golf course area, now abandoned for lack of maintenance funds, has still not successfully returned to nature. The original flora and fauna are still nowhere to be seen.
Like the Seine, which was supposed to be "swimmable" in Paris for the opening of the Games in July 2024, the committee's other flagship promise was to clean up Guanabara Bay, which is heavily polluted by sewage and plastic waste. By the time the Rio Games opened, the goal of reducing the amount of wastewater discharged by 80% had not been achieved, and many aquatic competitions had to be relocated. And no improvement in water quality was seen in the years that followed. Here again, however, Rio is on the verge of succeeding. Aguas do Rio has been commissioned to treat 99% of the bay's drinking water and 90% of its wastewater. The 22. 7-billion-reais program should eventually restore water quality around the 47 islands and 53 beaches of Guanabara Bay. The 9-kilometre wastewater discharge tunnel off Ipanema was cleared for the first time since 1980. Marine life is coming back a little more every day. Seahorses, marine animals that are sensitive to water pollution, have not been seen for decades. The clean-up work seems to be slowly bearing fruit.
Mariana: an unprecedented ecological disaster
In November 2015, Mariana, a small town in Minas Gerais, was the scene of Brazil's worst ecological disaster. A dam broke and millions of tons of toxic sludge flooded the region. The freshwater dam was an impoundment of waste from an upstream iron ore mine. In a matter of 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. The torrent flowed into the Rio Doce river, home to numerous endangered and endemic species whose survival is still uncertain to this day, in the absence of sufficiently detailed studies. This deadly flow continued on its way to the Atlantic, which it is estimated will take centuries to eliminate the toxic residues, heavy metals and hyper-pollutants.
The mining sector, one of the pillars of the Minas Gerais economy (literally "general mines" in Portuguese), with its powerful multinationals, does not seem to have learned any lessons from this tragedy. Another mining dam by the same operator broke at Brumadinho in 2019. Although the quantity of mud released was three times less, the human and environmental toll was colossal.
Institutions in charge of the environment
In this federal state, several institutions are in charge of the environment. The highest environmental authority is the Ministério do Meio Ambiente, the Ministry of the Environment, located in Brasilia. Since its creation in 1985, it has been responsible for the broad outlines of Brazil's environmental policy.
It oversees the Brazilian Institute for the Environment and Renewable Natural Resources (IBAMA), whose role is more to monitor and punish infringements.
Finally, the Instituto Chico Mendes de Conservação da Biodiversidade (ICMBio) has the onerous task of managing the country's 1,000 protected areas. It is named in honor of Chico Mendes, a"seringueiro" (latex picker) who was murdered by landowners' thugs for fighting to protect the Amazon.
Rio and Minas Gerais national parks
The state of Rio de Janeiro boasts five national parks. The Parque nacional da Tijuca - Floresta da Tijuca is, of course, the best known. With a surface area of 4,000 hectares, it encompasses many of the city's symbols (Pedra da Gávea, Corcovado, Christ the Redeemer...) in spectacular surroundings. The forest is not only home to numerous animals, such as the common coati(Nasua nasua), the common marmoset(Callithris jachus) or the woolly porcupine(Sphiggurus insidiosus), endemic to Brazil. It is a veritable cornucopia for the city's inhabitants, with its numerous springs, tree roots that limit erosion, soils that absorb floods and plants that act as natural depollutants against atmospheric pollution.
The Parque nacional da Serra da Bocaina is the largest in the state, covering over 100,000 hectares. It was created in 1971, straddling the states of Rio and São Paulo, around the magnificent Paraty coastline. Many endangered plant and animal species find refuge here. Five mammals endemic to the Atlantic forest inhabit it, including four species of monkey, and a rodent related to the porcupine, the Sphiggurus villosus.
The state of Rio, always a pioneer in Brazil, also boasts the country's first two national parks: Parque nacional do Itatiaia, created in 1937, and Serra dos Orgãos, in 1939. The former, which means "pointed rock" in Tupi, an indigenous language, is aptly named, as it contains Brazil's fifth-highest peak, Pico das Agulhas Negras. The second is also named after its mountains, which resemble the pipes of an organ(orgão in Portuguese). Finally, the Parque nacional da Restinga da Jurubatiba features a typically Brazilian ecosystem known as restinga. This is a sandy strip of land between a lagoon or the ocean. This is not only the largest, but also the best-preserved restinga in the country, since it is virtually untouched by man.
In Rio, at the foot of the Tijuca forest, the Jardim Botânico can almost be considered a nature park in its own right. It is world-renowned for its spectacular collection of Brazilian and exotic plants. It includes 6,500 species, some of which are threatened with extinction. The Botanical Garden is responsible for cataloguing Brazilian flora and protecting the country's endangered species.
