Amazon’s future bleak unless environmental protection and industrial development policies are overhauled: Aline Carrara

 An Indigenous Brazilian young woman of Tupi Guarani ethnicity, with her child. Photo: iStock

The ongoing drought in the Amazon is exceptional by all accounts. Rivers that have never run dry in living memory, are now bone-dry, their beds lifeless. This has not only affected humans and non-humans alike but has once again highlighted that the planet is already on the high road to becoming uninhabitable.

Aline Carrara is an artist, storyteller and an activist for anticolonial and decolonial practices. With a background as a social scientist, she identifies as a nature and human geographer. She has worked on indigenous territoriality, Amazonian infrastructural politics and the ‘ethno-environmental fix’ in Brazil.

Down To Earth spoke to Carrara on the tragedy taking place in the region and what it spells for humanity’s future. Edited excerpts:

Rajat Ghai (RG): This is probably the first time that such an unprecedented phenomenon has happened in the lives of the Amazonian peoples. How are they coping with it?

 

Aline Carrara (AC): Climatic models have been predicting droughts and forests causing “dieback” in the Amazon region for at least 30 years. Studies have long indicated that the whole Amazon Basin could reach a “tipping point” through desertification. These predictions are already coming true.

The current scenario of hydrological crisis is devastating due to lack of rain and rising temperatures resulting from the El Niño phenomenon, which has intensified due to anthropogenic forces. The abnormal warming of surface waters in the Atlantic and the Pacific Ocean is affecting the rainfall regime in several parts of the world.

In the Amazon region, this has contributed to drastic climatic changes. These include drought-like conditions accentuated due to the decrease in humidity and the lack of rain, damaging vegetation, fauna and the wellbeing of local communities.

In the state of Amazonas alone, more than half of its municipalities are under a state of emergency and it is estimated that more than 500,000 people will be affected by isolation, lack of mobility and transportation, lack of potable water and food scarcity.

Such climatic aberrations are also accompanied by historic structural processes of colonial land management, extractive resource use for a variety of industry (like mining, hydropower, cattle ranching and agriculture) and an ecologically unsound urbanism.

This polycrisis is amplifying the vulnerabilities of communities in terms of their food security, livelihood needs and ultimately, social-ecological wellbeing. For example, the difficulties to access fishing grounds, elevated levels of fish mortality, reduction of fish size and disappearance of some species highlight this issue. This has all the trappings of a humanitarian crisis, ironically in the world’s largest hydrological basin.

RG: What are the visible impacts on the socio-economic-political lives of Amazonian peoples?

AC: The impacts of the drought are being felt across the socio-economic divide. Manaus, the capital of Amazonas state in Brazil, and a massive commercial hub depends on the hundreds of tributaries of the Amazon river for the movement of freight. In the rainforest, roads are hard to build and also quite undependable given the movement of the powerful rivers.

With basins drying out, the movement of goods in and out are being severely impacted, with manufacturers inside production centres like the Manaus Industrial Park fearful about the added burden of increased freight to a slowly reviving COVID-19 impacted industry.

On the other hand, communities which use the riverways as their primary form of transportation are under severe threat of being ‘marooned’. These desiccated channels are being unable to transport essential goods to such far-flung paces while also failing to provide the transportation needs of community members.

Finally, the increasing heat and dryness are making the already challenging work in the primary industry even more physically demanding, with workers dealing with smoke from fires and a lack of access to water.

News from the region is coming in intermittently but the situation does not look good. For example, a riverside community 170 kilometres from Manaus was swallowed by a crater, after a ravine collapsed. Two people died and another 300 were directly affected.

RG: What about the future since this is now going to recur given the climate emergency?

AC: Brazil and other nations that together comprise the Amazon region need to actively rethink their developmental policies while simultaneously addressing territorial sovereignty and wellbeing needs of regional indigenous communities.

They also need to envision justice-driven environmental and climate strategies. This is critical in order to ensure holistic environmental management systems that move away from heavy handed fortress conservation of the past as well as the corporate greenwashing through carbon capitalism.

I believe Brazil’s current development pathway is aiding and amplifying the impacts of climate change in the Amazon.

Brazil’s commitment to economic development (under the Initiative for the Integration of the Regional Infrastructure of South America (IIRSA), which aims to transform Amazonia into a “multimodal transportation corridor and a source of hydropower”) has initiated and completed a number of large projects in Amazonia, especially for hydropower generation.

There are 157 large hydroelectric dams in operation today, and 21 dams under construction. The current trajectory of dam construction will leave only three free-flowing tributaries in the next few decades if all 280 planned dams are completed.

The construction of hydropower dams causes drastic change in the natural flow of rivers and its ripple effects directly affects the region’s aquatic and terrestrial ecosystems. The reduction in the volume of water in the Madeira River, for example, can lead to prolonged periods of drought, affecting not only aquatic fauna and riverine habitats, but also impacting local communities that depend on this river for their subsistence.

Mining is another sector that has put Amazonia as a key regional target of IIRSA due to its vast stores of extractive resources (petroleum, bauxite, gold, iron and other minerals), potential for hydropower, and strategic location connecting the agricultural powerhouse with global commodity markets.

Ultimately, such extractive activities are enabled through the historical process of land grabbing which began during colonial times and has been formulated into the modern state’s agenda as a key element of national economic progress.

Indigenous territories have been systematically undermined by the legislative unrealiability of the state, lack of regulatory teeth to take on powerful corporate interests and also a global environmental politics which has sought to protect nature without the humans whose relationship to the region stretches back thousands of years.

In the future, these problematic policies regarding both environmental protection and industrial development will need to be actively overhauled. Without such widespread changes in territorial management, the future of the region seems quite bleak.

RG: How will this play out for indigenous rights at COP28, Dubai?

AC: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports, for the first time in their latest iteration, have named colonisation as a cause of the current climate crisis. However, despite such mentions, many indigenous leaders from the Amazon region noted the platforming and advocacy of ‘false’ solutions at COP27.

Large-scale investment in carbon credit schemes or infrastructure construction fail to address the ongoing assault on indigenous territorial rights in the region. Also, the importance given to national interests over the interests of indigenous groups within these nations (like Brazil) continues to be a contentious issue.

At what many are calling the ‘Oil and Gas’ COP in Dubai, indigenous leaders from the Amazon are continuing to push for safeguards against their territorial rights from both state and non-state actors. Their claim, one backed by years of science, is that their ecological management systems are the most effective barrier against rampant deforestation, and therefore dessication and extinction.

Coordinated indigenous leadership organisations such as COICA are gearing up to keep asking for more indigenous presence within climate finance initiatives as well as increasing support to safeguarding of the lives and wellbeing of indigenous people who are being violently targeted by a variety of land grabbing interests.

RG: What about Brazilian politics? How will that be impacted by the Amazonian drought?

AC: Between 2016 and 2022, the Brazilian government was orchestrated by powerful actors who supported mechanisms to weaken and dismantle legal and political environmental safeguards by cutting funds to various environmental and scientific agencies.

They have also vociferously declared an enduring commitment to anti-indigenous policies, and have actively promoted political and financial incentives to bolster the extractive and high environmental impact sectors of development, through changes in environmental licensing and land tenure regulations.

This political-economic maneuvering is playing out against a backdrop of widespread deforestation in the Amazon, which enabled by such mobilisations, has reached the highest seen in the last decade.

The lack of prevention or adaptation policies to climate change is obviously greatly missed since there is no well-established policy in Brazil, neither at federal, state nor municipal level.

Given this situation, a group of around 70 researchers in the environment, society, water resources and climate change sent a letter to the Legislature of the state of Amazonas asking for measures to prevent and mitigate this year’s imminent climate impacts on local populations, emphasising the dire need for mobilising financial resources, technical teams and equipment to serve the remote populations of the Amazon (indigenous and non-indigenous), who are at greater risk of suffer from diseases, malnutrition and losses in their livelihoods.

Despite moving away from a climate denial governmental scenario, the current administration’s position is one of agents and institutions involved in profiting off the millions of dollars that are being mobilised in the name of economic development and as means to address the climate crisis.

Such ‘crisis capitalism’ is leading to policy making and design which have a very high maladaptive potential — the ability to increase climate vulnerability for the most marginalised communities, instead of making things better.

It is imperative that we move beyond terminologies and narratives which remain solely rooted to climate challenges. In order to address the polycrisis which is gripping the Amazon region’s present and possible futures, we need to explore avenues that lead to plural knowledges and platform indigenous and local experiences. This has the potential of strengthening justice-based frameworks which can repair the traumatic and extractive political economic relationships that are fueling our current crisis.

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