In a remote part of the Brazilian Amazon, a scientific expedition is cataloging species. Time is of the essence.
“The rate of destruction is faster than the rate of discovery,” says botanist Francisco Farronay of the National Institute of Amazonian Research (INPA) as he slices into the bark of a giant tree and smells its insides.
“It’s a race against time.”
The world’s largest rainforest, still largely unexplored by science, is being ravaged by deforestation for agriculture, mining and illegal logging.
According to a MapBiomas study last year, the Amazon lost about 74.6 million hectares of native vegetation between 1985 and 2020 – an area equivalent to the entire territory of Chile.
The destruction accelerated under the government of far-right President Jair Bolsonaro, who has been accused by environmentalists of actively promoting deforestation for economic gain.
The rainforest is considered crucial for mitigating climate change as it absorbs earth-warming CO2.
Since 2019, when Bolsonaro came to power, the average annual deforestation in the Brazilian Amazon has increased by 75 percent compared to the previous decade, according to official figures.
– “Science Denial” –
“Most plant species in the Amazon are found in intervention areas,” said Alberto Vicentini, another member of the Greenpeace-sponsored expedition.
It is estimated that “we do not know 60 percent of tree species, and every time an area is cut down, it destroys a part of biodiversity that we will never know,” said the INPA scientist.
For their research in this remote part of the northern Brazilian state of Amazonas, the team took a plane from Manaus and flew to Manicore over hundreds of kilometers of verdant forest cut by meandering rivers.
From there, a five-hour boat ride up the river for a week-long expedition to collect plant samples and observe animal behavior, for which they installed cameras and microphones.
The group includes experts on mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles and fish, trees and flowers. But it’s a tough time being a scientist in Brazil, they say.
“We live in a moment of science denial, as we saw with the pandemic in Brazil,” said Vicentini, in which Bolsonaro railed against masks and vaccines.
“Research institutions in Brazil are being attacked by this government’s policies, universities are suffering many cuts,” he added.
A sheet of newspaper used by one of the group’s botanists to press a flower is captioned, “Increasing Log Extraction in the Amazon,” with a photo of two trucks loaded with logs exiting the rainforest.
“There are places where nobody has ever been, we have no idea what is there,” said INPA biologist Lucia Rapp Py-Daniel.
“Without the resources to do an investigation, we don’t even have the information necessary to explain why we need to conserve the area,” she said.
Resources have been dwindling for a decade — another phenomenon critics say has accelerated under Bolsonaro.
In May, Brazil’s two main scientific societies, the Brazilian Academy of Sciences (ABC) and the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science (SBPC), warned that funding for scientific research in the country would fall by almost 3.0 billion reais (approx $560 million) would be cut ) this year.
“We should speed up the research pace in the face of destruction, but instead we’re slowing it down,” says Py-Daniel.
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