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The Amazon rainforest and the global climate are on the line Sunday, when Brazilians go to the polls to choose between President Jair Bolsonaro and his challenger, former President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
The two candidates promise near-opposite fates for the Amazon, at a crucial moment when the rainforest is teetering on the edge of a dangerous tipping point.
If deforestation continues there at current rates, the Amazon will pass an irreversible threshold in just a decade or two, dooming it to turn into a savanna and release billions of tons of heat-trapping gases, scientists warn. That would accelerate a climate crisis that’s already fueling dangerous extreme weather across the planet.
Bolsonaro promises to increase deforestation in the Amazon, while Lula promises to slow it.
Neither of them gained majority support in a first round of voting, so they go to a runoff election on Sunday. Polls have shown them neck-and-neck.
„It is the most consequential election in Brazil’s history. But it’s also the most consequential election on the planet,“ Christian Poirier, program director at the advocacy group Amazon Watch, told Insider. „Who wins that election determines our climate future.“
Since his election four years ago, Bolsonaro has openly encouraged clear-cutting and burning in the Amazon for agriculture. His administration slashed the budget for the agency that enforces environmental laws in the Amazon, virtually defanging the rainforest’s existing protections.
These policies have allowed illegal logging and mining to spread through protected areas and Indigenous territories. Pollution, deforestation, and violence have followed in their wake.
Instances of miners, loggers, and ranchers illegally invading Indigenous territory nearly tripled during Bolsonaro’s administration, according to records from the Catholic Church’s Indigenous Missionary Council.
