Brazil’s return to the global environmental sphere and the hope for the dawn of a new day

Abstract

Greetings, everyone – my name is Dahvii Shiva and I am writing to you from a small fragment of the rich Atlantic Rainforest, the ‘Mata Atlântica’, in Bahia, Northeast Brazil. I have been attempting to write this ‘On the Ground’ piece for the past three weeks, but it is only now I have had the opportunity to sit and write amongst a lot of travelling and the political changes happening in my country. And this is the perfect moment, as a new political cycle has just begun, giving me confidence and attentiveness to what we call ‘Sinais do Tempo’ (the signs of time). After Brazil went through a period that will go down in the annals of history as the most nefarious political moment since the democratization of Brazil in 1988, we can finally glimpse the horizon of a new day from these lands. In 2019, as soon as the former Brazilian president Bolsonaro (still in office but ‘gone’) took office, he withdrew Brazil from hosting the Conference of the Parties of the United Nations Climate Change Convention (COP25), which was to be hosted in Brazil that year. Now, at this very moment, the newly elected president of Brazil, Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva (known as Lula), who will take office on 1 January 2023, is already on his way to COP27 in Egypt. Yes, friends, it is a drastic transformation in the official Brazilian posture in forums related to the environment, and yes, we have a lot to talk about and build together. Lula’s victory in the presidential elections in Brazil has immense implications for not only us in Brazil, but for everyone on the planet. His election reopens opportunities for us to deal with the climate and biodiversityloss crisis as a mega-ecological power and holder of the greatest biodiversity on the planet. New avenues of cooperation are opening for the protection and valorization of biodiversity, the protection of life, and the maintenance and regeneration of living systems for a good living and planetary well-being, with major impacts on issues of planetary emergency. Not only is Brazil the most biologically mega-diverse country in the world, but it is also in its territory that we find the largest rainforest and river basin in the world: the Amazon. These are treasures of immense greatness to which the fate of all the planet’s inhabitants is tied, and which play a crucial role in maintaining the possibility of regeneration of the Earth’s living systems. Historically, Brazil assumed a leadership role in international forums related to environmental issues. However, even though prohibited by the Brazilian Federal Constitution, we have suffered terrible setbacks in this area since the fascist government assumed political power in our country (in 2019). The affront and dismantling of environmental and climate change policies and systems in our country has been very serious, with a heavy ecological debt not only for the Brazilian population, but also the world’s populations. The immense escalation of frightening deforestation occurring in the Amazon, encouraged and incited by the federal government, coupled with a blatant disregard of the rights of first nations peoples and the destruction of the bodies at the service of indigenous policy – these factors all form the complex transversal environmental issues that Brazil faces. To give us some perspective, it is worth pointing out that according to the latest report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC 2022), humanity is left with a small window of time (no more than 10 years) when it is still possible to take some action to mitigate and adapt to climate change, with the associated serious socio-environmental catastrophes – many of which are already being faced insufficiently and unfairly, such as the recent case of extreme flooding in Pakistan. In any case, the report is categorical in stating that the efforts of humanity must be allocated to combat the climate emergency and to what the indigenous peoples in Brazil call the ‘Luta pela Vida’ (Struggle for Life).