Who Owns the Amazon?
The Brazilian Supreme Court yesterday blocked an attempt by the country’s rapacious rice farming industry to plow under a 4.2 million acre section of the Amazon rainforest. This decision didn’t receive a lot of press (it was buried in the news briefs in this morning’s Washington Post) but it gets my vote as the most important climate change development to date in this new year.
The Court concluded the land in question, known as the Raposa Serra do Sol reservation, belonged to 18,000 aboriginal Amazionian Indians.
This is the latest twist in a decades-long struggle between an aboriginal people and the modern agricultural industry over the future of the Amazon.
But here’s the larger import: preventing deforestation in the Amazon rainforest may be as important to climate change as any legislation that the United States could adopt.
Depending on who you talk to, Brazil is either the third or fourth largest carbon emitter on earth. Roughly 78 percent of Brazil’s carbon emissions are associated with Amazon deforestation. To date, almost 22 percent of the Amazon has been destroyed. The Amazon, like many other natural resources that are critical to our climate, is nearing a tipping point.
The aboriginal people appear to be more interested than the national government in engaging with the world’s nascent carbon markets to protect the Amazonian rainforest, pursuing Reduce Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation (REDD) initiatives to fund carbon sequestration through habitat protection.
The farmers on the losing end of yesterday’s decision view such engagement as a misguided effort that puts the rainforest in the control of foreigners. One farmer told the AP, "The court has endangered our national sovereignty."
Yesterday’s ruling will test that theory, paving the way for more carbon development efforts to protect the Amazon.
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