Brazil heads to the polls this Sunday, with president Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva likely to face a challenging second round contest against Flávio Bolsonaro, son of former president Jair Bolsonaro.
Ahead of the elections, a new study led by the University of Bonn has found that statements from Bolsonaro’s government, which served from 2019 to 2023, opposing forest conservation were associated with increased deforestation in parts of the Amazon.
The researchers examined deforestation alerts from the MapBiomas Alerta initiative, alongside more than 3,600 posts published on Twitter/X in 2019 by Bolsonaro and his ministers of agriculture, environment and foreign affairs.
Government statements
The study, entitled Anti-Environmental Signals and Deforestation: Evidence from Brazil, found that deforestation increased in areas where government messages were more likely to reach local populations.
According to the researchers, up to 1,700 square kilometres of forest – almost double the area of Berlin – were lost in 2019 as a result of government statements shared via social media. Similar patterns were also observed when examining other forms of media exposure, including television.
In the regions at greatest risk, deforestation increased ‘significantly’ in the months when Bolsonaro and his ministers had published posts opposing forest conservation, the report found.
“Supporters share [these messages] as do critics, and they are discussed locally until they reach the people who actually make decisions about deforestation,” commented Dr. Gustavo Magalhães de Oliveira, postdoctoral student at the Institute for Food and Resource Economics (ILR) at the University of Bonn. “They view them as a political signal.”
Local enforcement
The researchers also found that the government statements had no influence on municipal environmental fines or deforestation bans.
“Our analysis indicates that, as a result of the messages, people change their expectations of the extent to which they will be prosecuted for breaking the law,” Oliveira added. “The effect is thus not attributable to any changes in the local enforcement of forest conservation laws.”
The study was carried out by researchers from the University of Bonn, the University of Texas at Dallas and Wageningen University. It was funded by the Bonn SDG Fellowship Program, Germany’s Federal Ministry of Food and Agriculture, the German Research Foundation and the EU’s Horizon programme. Read more here and here.
