Brazil's environment calls for help!

This article presents a 21st Century agenda for Amazonian conservation. The agenda calls for developing a system of refugia and a scientific methodology for predicting impacts of the infrastructure development vision for the region. It also calls for a collaborative approach to conservation planning, in the interest of fruitful engagement with decision-makers and stakeholders. The ideas explored here emerged from the collaboration of peers over a decade, which culminated in a panel presentation, Scientific Analysis, and Simulation Models to Support Conservation and Development Decision-Making, at the Tools and Strategies Workshop held at the University of Florida in October, 2017. Abstract in Portuguese is available with online material.

Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 2018

The effects of Brazil’s political crisis on science funding necessary for biodiversity conservation are likely to be global. Brazil is not only the world’s most biodiverse nation, it is responsible for the greater part of the Amazon forest, which regulates the climate and provides rain to much of southern South America. Brazil was a world leader in satellite monitoring of land-use change, in-situ biodiversity monitoring, reduction in tropical-forest deforestation, protection of indigenous lands, and a model for other developing nations. Coordinated public responses will be necessary to prevent special-interest groups from using the political crisis to weaken science funding, environmental legislation and law enforcement.

(Book) Stability of Tropical Rainforest Margins (Tscharntke T; Leuschner C; Zeller M; Guhardja E; Bidin A. edts. ), 2007

Page 1. Science and technology and sustainable development in Brazilian Amazon Diógenes S. Alves Instituto Nacional de Pesquisas Espaciais (INPE), Av dos Astronautas 1758, CEP 12227-010 S˜ao José dos Campos SP, Brazil, Email: dalves@dpi.inpe.br Summary ...

tIn the middle of a political and fiscal crisis, the Brazilian government is applying successive budget cuts,including in science funding. Recent cuts radically affect research programs on biodiversity that arecrucial components for the design and monitoring of public policies for nature conservation and sustain-able development. We analyze the consequences of such cuts on the Research Program on Biodiversity(PPBio), the largest biodiversity research network in Brazil (626 researchers, nine networks in all Brazil-ian biomes). Brazil holds a substantial part of the world’s biodiversity and of tropical forests that play asignificant role for regional and global climate stability. If underfunding is maintained, the dismantlingof the Brazilian PPBio will have consequences that go beyond biodiversity knowledge itself but affectsociety as a whole. Brazil will likely fail to reach the National Targets for Biodiversity 2011–2020, and itwill be difficult to fulfill the restoration target of the Brazilian NDC and to advance with the sustainabledevelopment goals.

NATURE, 2014