The lack of jobs and income among the inhabitants of the Amazon contributes to supporting economic activities that ignore environmental and climate costs, including deforestation. This is what the study “Productive reforestation, conservation and economic development in the Brazilian Amazon” points out. According to the study, Amazonians live with socioeconomic indicators lower than the national average, which creates a scenario conducive to the prioritization of destructive activities to the detriment of environmental conservation, highlight Rede Onda Digital, g1 and Estadão.
Lack of jobs and income drives deforestation in the Amazon, study indicates
The lack of jobs and income among the inhabitants of the Amazon contributes to supporting economic activities that ignore environmental and climate costs, including deforestation. This is what the study “Productive...
"The 28 million people who live in the region continue to live with socioeconomic indicators notably lower than the national average. In 2021, the real GDP per capita in the Legal Amazon was R$32,000, almost a third below the R$44,000 recorded in the rest of Brazil. This economic fragility is closely linked to the scarcity of good jobs", says an excerpt from the study.
Therefore, forest preservation needs to include job creation, argues Salo Coslovsky, author of the study. He is an associate professor at New York University and a researcher at Amazônia 2030, an initiative by Brazilian scholars to create an action plan for the sustainable development of the region.
Deforestation in the Amazon peaked in the 1990s. Since then, the conservation discourse has gained a planetary scale. Contradictorily, deforestation never stopped, although it slowed down. This happens, according to Coslovsky, because some of the people in the region are economically linked to activities that destroy the forest, such as mining, logging and cattle farming. And there is no creation of alternatives to this.
The prioritization of destructive activities over preservation is reflected in voting behavior. During Jair Bolsonaro's government (2019-2022), deforestation in the Amazon increased from 28,500 km², recorded in the four-year period between 2015 and 2018, to 45,600 km². Even so, the study recalls, Bolsonaro obtained between 65% and 75% of the votes in Rondônia, Acre, Mato Grosso and Roraima in the dispute for re-election, in addition to winning in Amapá, albeit by a narrow margin.
The reversal of this perspective involves what the researcher calls “productive reforestation”, according to the research: the conversion of already deforested areas and degraded pastures into agroforestry systems, based on perennial species. This strategy would have as a success metric the generation of employment and income, and not just the extent of the area recovered.
The survey estimates that enterprises based in the Amazon already earn US$7.2 billion (R$37.2 billion) per year with products linked to this type of activity. A value that represents just 3% of a total market estimated at US$230 billion (R$1.2 trillion).
Source: ClimaInfo
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