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BRAZIL will lose a quarter of its Amazon rainforest if a gigantic government
development scheme goes ahead as planned, an international scientific team
warned last week. “The fate of the greatest tropical rainforest on Earth is at
stake,” they say.

Road networks, hydroelectric schemes, gas pipelines and river channelling
projects will be built under a $40 billion programme called Advance
Brazil. Its goal is to expand mining, agricultural and timber industries across
the Amazon region. “This is a huge scheme,” says ecologist Philip Fearnside of
INPA, Brazil’s National Institute for Amazon Research in Manaus. Its budget
dwarfs the $340 million that G7 countries recently allocated to protect
Amazonian biodiversity.

To gauge the scheme’s impact, the researchers created computer models that
combined the Advance Brazil plans with the environmental effects of smaller
projects in the past. “We modelled impacts such as deforestation, fragmentation
and vulnerability to wildfires,” says Mark Cochrane from Michigan State
University in East Lansing.

They predict that by 2020 deforestation will increase by up to 500,000
hectares per year, while degradation of pristine forest will increase by between
1.53 and 2.37 million hectares per year. Without human developments, scientists
think it is likely that the Amazon rainforest will survive the effects of climate change
(see p 36).

“No serious environmental impact analysis has been attempted at any level,”
claims William Laurance of the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in
Balboa, Panama. “Brazil’s environmental agencies are now being consulted, but
they were excluded from much of the planning process.”

The scheme will overwhelm existing conservation measures, the researchers
say. In the past, it has been almost impossible for the government to control
the logging, mining and land speculation that followed the building of new
roads.

Not all scientists accept that the model is valid, however. “I disagree with
some of its most important assumptions,” says ecologist Dan Nepstad of the Woods
Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, who has modelled the effects of Amazonian
wildfires. “We are still a few years away from really mathematically modelling
the future of Amazonia. It’s too early to predict with scientific rigour the
effects of such infrastructural investments”.